


Second Chances at First Impressions

by vicariously kingly (pelted)



Series: One Half a Whole AU [1]
Category: Red Dead Redemption
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Canon Divergence, F/M, M/M, Slow Burn, red thread of fate au, with a little homebrew twist
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-15
Updated: 2019-01-28
Packaged: 2019-10-10 14:20:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 25,072
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17427548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pelted/pseuds/vicariously%20kingly
Summary: People said,Fate’s a powerful thing,as if a little red string ruled their lives.John said and Arthur echoed,Fate’s a bitch,as if they weren’t as helpless as anybody else to a red gleam over the never-ending gray circling thin and unremarkable around their fingers.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> **context** : in this universe, everyone has one (x1) soulmate. your pinky finger is marked with a grey ring until you meet that soulmate, wherein the grey turns red and a "thread" connects you two while you stand close together. 
> 
> this is a highly self-indulgent, introspection-heavy look into the gang thru the aid of a soulmate au. it also deals a lot with world building bc c'mon lbr soulmate universes are w h a c k.
> 
> typically I have fics entirely planned and written out before posting, but this one's pretty meander-y and still very in the works... think of it more like a collection of soulmate au ficlets set in a variety of canon times than one continuous narrative, please! rating and warnings are subject to change as updates come. hope you enjoy reading, it's been fun to write. :D

“Welcome back, Arthur. How’d it go?”

“You should’ve been there, Javier. That Abigail had heard right. It was a damned miracle.”

Javier paused in polishing his shoes to meet Arthur’s grin with one of his own. Hard not to when he’d seen the two full bags he and John had emptied of green into the camp funds. Afterwards the twenty-something year old Morgan strutted around, his chin up with well-earned pride. More than once he demurred to Abigail’s sleuthing skill over his and John’s skills in persuasion, but that just made him easier to like in the aftermath of a perfectly done job. Dutch had praised his _two boys_ loud enough for the whole camp to hear, which made Susan roll her eyes in exasperated fondness and complain underbreath to Javier that Dutch would surely let their easy job go to their heads. Something Arthur wouldn’t fall for, she was sure, but John was pretty new and young besides. Wouldn’t do to let him get too big for his britches, she said. Pride got a man killed more often than anything else.

True enough, but Javier saw no trouble in celebrating a job well done.

And that was why he prompted, as Arthur clearly wanted him to, “So. Unguarded stagecoach?”

“Unguarded stagecoach,” Arthur repeated with a happy nod. “In and out easy as you please. Not one shot fired. Even Johnny couldn’t mess up that one.”

It was happy for him, anyway. More smirk than smile. Understated pride or self-satisfied smugness, depending on one’s opinion of Arthur Morgan. Javier’s opinion was fairly positive, so he took the expression in good humor.

“Looked like a nice haul,” Javier noted, because it was true.

Another nod. Still pleased with himself. 

The cheer faulted when he glanced around the main campfire. After finishing hauling hay and chopping firewood, Javier hadn’t work for the afternoon or evening; he’d set up to polish his shoes, clean his guns and pluck at his guitar. By Arthur’s searching look of the meager tent and slow-burning fire, his plan to spend the rest of the day wasn’t as quiet.

Proven true when he asked, his brow furrowing slightly and smirk falling off, “You know where Hosea’s at? Been looking for him.”

Ah.

Made sense. Javier might’ve only been in the van der Linde gang for three months, but it hadn’t taken more than a week to figure out the hierarchy. Dutch sat at the top. A step below him, Hosea. Below _him_ , Arthur. Or, more accurately, side-to-side with Hosea, just in a different skill set. Though a decent shot, the older gentleman was definitely more suited to planning and talking than Arthur’s hands-on approach. That too made sense, dividing them into separate categories of crook and in-camp stature. All the same, the way Arthur acted and the state of Dutch and Hosea’s relationship, Javier felt more certain on thinking Arthur in third, not second, place. Took a lot more than a quick draw to pull more favor than a man’s soulmate.

Javier said, resuming his shoe-polishing, “He went to see his sister.”

A surprised guffaw. Arthur asked, sounding incredulous, “His _sister?_ ”

Didn’t seem that big of a deal to Javier. He said, keeping nonchalant, “Yeah. You know. Bessie.”

Another guffaw, louder than the first. Arthur placed his hands on his hips and eyed Javier-- this, Javier didn’t see, but felt, in the way anyone could tell someone indignant laid eyes upon them. 

Arthur echoed, “Bessie.” Then, a touch amused, “She, uh. She’s no sister.”

Didn’t seem to matter where someone sat on the family tree so long as they were family, but Arthur’s amusement warned him that he was missing something much bigger than a marriage twice removed or estranged uncle’s daughter. Javier frowned to himself. Scrubbed at a particularly tough spot of mud on the side of his shoe, letting the pause drag out between them. Ventured, finally, “Cousin?”

More amused, “Not a cousin, neither. Though Hosea’s got it bad enough, I couldn’t rightly tell you how much blood would matter so long as she was far enough out.”

Javier stopped his shoe-polishing a second time. 

Looked up. Squinted at him. Said, carefully and with full intention of getting more information, “ _It?_ ”

“You never seen them together, have you?” Arthur shifted his weight foot-to-foot and barely maintained a deadpan expression. Excitement lined the crinkles at the corners of his eyes, him clearly excited to be the one to break the news of whatever Hosea and Bessie’s tie was. An unusual look for him. In truth, it was one Javier more expected from John, eighteen and determined to prove he knew more than folk thought he did. “Ask Hosea, he’ll tell you Bessie hangs the stars. No, blood ain’t what they share. Those two are deathly in love.”

Javier didn’t share his excitement.

Instead, unbidden, his gaze snapped to the off-white slice of Dutch’s tent that could be seen from the main campfire. 

Dutch himself wasn’t visible. Reading a book on the other side, maybe. Out and about the camp, also possibly. He had that new fling, the Annabel woman. Perhaps she was visiting while Hosea was out. An unconventional set-up, Javier privately thought up, but not an unusual one. Only thing that made it so strange was Hosea’s knowledge and lack of sour opinion on the matter. 

A fling was one thing. Somebody to be sweet on, somebody with quite literally no strings attached. Somebody to enjoy and leave. Normal, all considered.

Love was a different beast entirely. _Love,_ outside one’s soulmate. Love after discovering one’s soulmate, _in spite of_ a soulmate, despite that soulmate being healthy and hale and of appropriate age and inclination for all fate promised a soulmate to be.

Javier remarked, unable to keep his confusion entirely tamped down but fortunately restraining his instant suspicion on what Hosea was playing at, “That’s... strange.”

“Is it?” 

Didn’t take more than a second for Javier to register Arthur’s amusement had fled. He stepped into Javier’s vision, blocking his scrutinization of Dutch’s tent. Self-preservation and years of dealing with folk like Arthur -- protective, zealously and passionately enough to dip into possessive, with a mountain-sized chip on their shoulder from any matter of life’s ills -- kept Javier quiet, his gaze moving up from Arthur’s squared-up shoulders to meet his eyes.

“Suppose not,” Javier said, after a moment. “Doesn’t have to be.”

“I agree.” Amiably, as a fox to a hen. “Not like any of us are normal to begin with, but that don’t mean their opening their hearts wider than others is a problem.”

That sounded much less like Arthur and much more like Dutch. Sounded also like Arthur had once taken trouble with it, and had to be straightened out. Sounded sensitive, whether in the past or present. Aware of the tangled mess such a topic made, Javier kept his tone subdued and observational. “Some might say it’s testing fate and courting tragedy.”

“Some need to get their noses out of other people’s business before somebody cuts it off.”

Javier snorted. Glanced quick over Arthur’s shoulder to the tent, but then pointedly back to his shoe. Although it sparkled just fine, he kept working at it. 

“Guess so,” he said, easy. 

Felt, in the pause to follow, as Arthur judged his take on their business. Could tell the moment he made his decision that Javier wouldn’t be needing a reminder to leave off, as the tension dropped from the air.

“Glad you agree,” he said. Started to leave off himself, turning away to - ironically, perhaps - head toward Dutch’s tent. Maybe he had something about Hosea to discuss. Maybe he always gravitated toward the camp’s center. Javier didn’t linger too long on it, as it didn’t concern him. “Talk later, then.”

“See you, Arthur,” Javier called after him, not looking up as he moved to his next shoe.

On his own little finger was the blackened circle of a soulmate years dead. 

If he’d more time with her. If he’d known. If they hadn’t been young and foolish and desperate, and given their heart’s greatest gift for the span of a mayfly’s life, the things he would’ve done… 

Ultimately, it didn’t matter. Fate was fate, and Arthur was right. How Hosea and Dutch used their time together -- if they used it to be _apart_ \-- was no business of his.

* * *

People said, _fate’s a powerful thing,_ as if a little red string ruled their lives.

John said, _fate’s a bitch,_ as if he wasn’t as helpless as anybody else to a red gleam over the never-ending gray circling thin and unremarkable around his finger. 

Dutch had taken him in when he was thirteen. Rescued him from a hanging, gave him a family, a purpose, a gun and good food and a tent and maybe a few cuffs around the head but only when it was well and truly deserved. Two years later in the foothills of Montana, the grey around his finger turned red _once_. They’d been passing on the outskirts of a mining town, on the run from a high profile job done so well the law decided to take note of their camp. Needless to say, they hadn’t been in any position to stop and sniff around the winding copper tunnels for somebody who might not have even taken kindly to the outlaw lifestyle. 

Stupid thing was, John had actually believed himself that his soulmate wouldn’t like him. Except that was the point of a soulmate, wasn’t it? How could the mystery person not like his lifestyle when they were fated to be together? 

\-- Because he knew soulmates didn’t always mean a happy ever after. Because he’d seen it with his own soul-bonded parents, and he’d heard of Arthur’s similarly situated parents, and anyway, believing what he believed wasn’t so stupid. 

(That, he believed off and on for the next decade.)

Once they’d finally stopped running and set up camp - Hosea, Dutch, Arthur, him and Susan -, he told them what he’d seen. He’d shouted it on the trail as they’d rode hard out of the area, but nobody had the breath to respond. As the evening set in and everyone near nodded off around the campfire despite the threat of law putting holes in them all while they slept, there was time to talk. 

Dutch promised they could go back and check once things calmed down. Weren’t like anybody in a mining town was going anywhere fast, he said with a laugh; then added, at John’s affronted look, “Look, son. I just mean, if they’re there, we’ll find them. It’s obvious their life isn’t starting until you ride in.”

“Alright,” he said, unable to sand down the rough edge in his voice.

Lounging carelessly on his bedroll with his journal open on his lap, socked feet kicked up by the fire despite Susan’s wrinkled nose and pointed shift to sit next to Hosea, Arthur said, “Bet you nothing even happened. Just your wishful thinking combined with the sun and trail dust.”

John expected his push-back, and launched to his defense. “Saw it start turning red plain as anything. Felt it heat, too, like-- like somebody was grabbing on and tugging me in the right direction.”

Arthur scoffed. “You felt jack shit. You heard that line outta one of Dutch’s books.”

Maybe so, but he’d also _felt it._

He shot back, “As if you’d know. Don’t reckon you’ll ever see red unless you carve your own mark.”

“Boys,” Dutch said, “we were having a nice night celebrating our good success.”

“Don’t think for a second either of you are too old to have your mouths scrubbed with soap,” Susan threatened. “We’ll have to use the bar I’ve got for dish-washing, too.” 

Feeling dogpiled _as always_ , John hunkered down and scowled at the one who’d started it.

Idly turning a page as if Susan’s threat weren’t a real one, Arthur snorted dismissively. Wouldn’t even look up from his dumb journal. Hosea had bought him a new one a day before the job well done, when they hadn’t even much money to spare and shouldn’t have been showing their faces around the town they’d soon plunder. Turned out the butcher’s sister bound books on the side. Real nice ones, too, with fancy stitching made from sheep leather. Its thick, cream paper looked better than any book John’d seen before (not that he’d seen many before Hosea got it in his head he wanted to teach John how to read). On Dutch scolding Hosea for lingering in town and getting his face known, Hosea insisted Arthur needed the book, for who knew when they’d next stop somewhere with a bookbinder that wouldn’t turn them in for their newest crime? 

“I wouldn’t begrudge any chasing the seventy dollars on our heads. Bookbinders this far from civilization don’t make much, you know,” Hosea had said, mock serious. “Not as if the poor jackasses can read. Reckon the donkeys can’t, neither.”

Dutch had laughed at that. Not like how he laughed over John’s soulmate potentially being some black lung miner. Rather, fondly. He’d admitted that was true, then brushed the back of his hand against Hosea’s as he moved on back into his tent. The brushing was something he did frequently-- was something John found himself fixating on despite his better judgment. He’d noticed it less than a month into his being in camp. Hard not to when the bright red thread materialized for all to see, binding the two outlaws together like a fairytale for sinners.

The thread disappeared once they were out of arm’s reach, of course. Formed from nothing but their bond, faded back into nothing but a bright red around their littlest fingers.

Years later when their little camp of five became a bigger camp of far-too-many, they bought soul rings to cover the red. Arthur said it wasn’t to _cover_ the red, it was to establish they were aware and committed. _What an idiotic belief._ They’d never cared to conform to society’s expectations before. If they weren’t doing it because they were running into trouble like every other soulmate pair inevitably did (though they were better at hiding the typical disputes-- when they argued where John heard or witnessed the aftermath of, it was never about who was committed to who), they were doing it because Dutch liked wearing rings, and he couldn’t very well wear a soul ring on his lonesome.

Arthur had looked a bit contemplative on John pointing that theory out. A bit too contemplative.

John’d blurted, his mouth working twice the speed of his brain, “It’d take an awfully pathetic person to have a soul ring without anybody to match.”

Arthur’d scowled. “Wasn’t thinking about _me_.”

“Of course not,” John’d deadpanned. “You ain’t that desperate. Yet.”

“Honestly, John? Was thinking you might be tempted,” Arthur’d sneered then, bristling faster than John’d expected, “since you left your match to choke on copper dust and all.”

As his fists also worked twice the speed of his brain, he’d thrown a punch before he’d processed the deep hurt behind Arthur’s words. 

It’d been a good tussle. Ended in split lips and black eyes, as well as ribs bruised so bad they could barely stay upright on a horse. Dutch had made them ride together to town the next morning anyway, telling them they were welcome back in camp after they’d pulled in the money to pay for their own morphine. 

It’d been the last time the two of them spoke about each other’s soulmates, or lack thereof. In the end of their frolic through lower Montana, John had never gone back for his match. Dutch and Hosea each had wheedled him over it, all but throwing him on his horse and offering to escort him there personally. But he’d thought-- he’d wondered- he’d worried- _what if it had been his imagination?_

Worse. What if it wasn’t?

(Then Abigail would join them. Then he would fall for her, just enough to stop worrying or wondering. Then Abigail got pregnant and named him the father; then he got scared, and she got terrified; then he wondered if he didn’t go for his soulmate right then, he never would, and packed his bags and left and didn’t look back until he’d scoured as much of Montana as he could stomach. 

He returned a year later, his failure a damning gray around his finger.)

Arthur’s stayed gray.

In that, if nothing else, they matched.

* * *

“Bit overdone, isn’t it?”

“Soulmates?” 

“Yes. I think it’s very tired. Like an old horse, only twice as unpleasant to look at.”

Karen and Tilly exchanged glances, then turned as one on Mary Beth. 

“ _You?_ ” Karen teased, disbelievingly accusing. “Not liking soulmates?”

“Did you hit your head?” Tilly demanded. “I see you reading about them every time we’re within twenty miles of a bookstore.”

“That’s why I can say it’s a subject that should be put to rest!” Mary Beth defended herself, hands up and palms out. The three of them sat around their tent, a pile of socks and shirts and trousers in need of darning as well as bleaching at their feet. “I’ve read enough of it. It’s always the same two things. Either the perfect match finds each other and then, after establishing a beautiful family despite life’s odds, one dies. Or it’s two folk who fight and bicker and pretend fate’s led them wrong until they inevitably fall in love.”

“Sounds like you’ve got something against love.”

Karen kept a straight face after saying so for all of five seconds, before bursting out laughing. Tilly joined her with a barely-stifled chuckling, made all the worse as Mary Beth rolled her eyes and huffed a, “Maybe I _do_ , when it’s so _contrived_ ,” at them.

When she’d recovered herself from laughing, Tilly threw her a bone. “What’s your problem with soulmates, exactly? ‘Cause if reading too much of it was the actual issue, I imagine you’d never moan and groan about missing a chapter installment in the papers when we move again.”

“I just think people should work a little harder for their love, is all,” Mary Beth said, shoulders slumping. “Lord knows aside from Dutch and Hosea, we’ve all had to.”

She spoke morosely, if not borderline glum. Like resignation on being a lonely spinster had taken her, despite her being the tender age of not-even-thirty.

Or, more accurately, she yucked it up for show.

Knowing full well the sad act was a poor show, Karen elbowed her in the ribs. Made her swat at her shoulder for doing so, her frown twitching into a smile.

“You have to admit it’s what everyone wants, so it must sell, no matter how repetitive it gets. I mean, everybody’s dreamed of their soulmate, right?” All three nodded, though Tilly asked the question. “What do you imagine?”

“Somebody rich,” Karen answered, straight-faced and instant.

“Oh, I like that answer,” Mary Beth mused, hand at her chin. “Can I have somebody rich, too?”

“I was being serious!” Tilly insisted with a grin. “Everybody wants somebody rich. But aside from that, what makes them your soulmate?”

“Don’t know what more you want from me,” Karen waved a hand dismissively, crossing one leg over the other. “Maybe I used to dream about more qualities, but… Lately, that’s the only thing we seem to be missing. Money. Reckon otherwise, we’ve got it pretty good.”

They were settled far west of New Austin on the outskirts of Texas’ largest cattle roundup. The cowboys had done their job in getting the animals to the pens. Word was, the New Yorkers that owned the ranches had decided to come in and personally pay for what livestock they needed shipped off for slaughter. In five days the trains were due in town with just that. Hopefully Trelawney hadn’t steered them wrong, but then, by the stench wafting downwind on bad days, there were steer aplenty.

“It’s true,” Mary Beth said. Tilly shook her head and went back to scrubbing the muck out of Arthur’s shirt after he and John had poised - ineptly - as cowboys meant to help drive a herd. After a spot of companionable quiet, Mary Beth continued, wistfully, “Honestly? I once thought my mark went red when I relieved a handsy gentleman of his money clip and found a hundred dollars.”

“Reckon you saw yourself a golden thread rather than red,” Tilly allowed, amused.

Karen scoffed, her smile twitching into a grimace by the end. “Hell, wish it were always golden threads. Sounds loads better than trusting fate, which has _never_ been kind, and getting tied up with some lout. Reckon if I do meet my soulmate, they’ll be the asshole nobody else could possibly want. Bet they’ll have kept themselves pure for me, or some other stupid nonsense.”

“What if you don’t even want to get in bed with them? Like, they’re ugly or nasty or just not your type,” Tilly muttered. “Not sure I like the idea of having to spread my legs because a red string said we were meant to be.”

“There’s those people who’re soulmates with their kids, ain’t there?” Karen’s nose wrinkled. “Oh, fuck. That’s got to be awkward to explain.”

“You don’t _have_ to sleep with your soulmate,” Mary Beth said, though she didn’t sound so sure. “Not necessarily. Anyway, it’s incredibly rare to be soulmates with someone you’re already related to.”

“Are you all talking about soulmates again?”

“Hi, Abigail.”

“Hey, Abigail.”

“Hello.”

“Yep, we sure are,” Karen rolled her eyes, “despite this one saying she were sick of them.”

“Can’t even imagine that, Mary Beth.”

“I know,” Mary Beth sighed. “I’ve been told about three times, now.”

The corner of Abigail’s mouth twitched up. She set the fresh wash bin down and pulled the dirtied one away. Strapped and swaddled in cloth on her back was Jack, the four-month-old mercifully asleep. By the dark circles under all their eyes, his deciding to sleep was sorely appreciated by all. It was a miracle the child not only lived but thrived, considering their camp’s conditions. It helped that they often chipped in for Abigail and the babe to stay at nearby, clean hotels, as well as extra food-- though, in honesty, that was also to stave off the idea that the wailing child was better off smothered. They loved Jack, they really did. Hard not to love the boy they all thought of as _theirs_. But they loved him when he was quiet, or happy, or asleep, which just about covered every good moment a baby could have. When he woke for the second time in the middle of the night, he became _hers._

(And she-- alone- struggled.

She loved him. She did. But she had dreams, too, and the one he’d inspired when he hadn’t yet been born had ran off to who-knew-where, and there was only so long she could use either Jack or his lost father as a reason to not add to the camp funds, and was this really what she’d wanted? Had she chosen so wrong by choosing herself, rather than bowing to fate?)

She said, “Overheard some of what you were saying, though. And I reckon Karen’s right. Outside of your fanciful books, there’s the lucky, and then there’s everybody else. Stuck with some sorry jackass who might’ve fit you at one point in your life, but no longer.”

That her mark was the dull, brown-red of a soulmate found, known and intentionally left behind, or Tilly’s mark had already gone black-- had _been_ black since she came to them, a soulmate lost forever without a clue as to who it could be-, nobody said. There was no need to note aloud what only the blind couldn’t see.

Tilly asked, sucking on her teeth as she did, “Do you really reckon you’re born with your match already made?”

“Don’t see how it could be any different.”

“You’re not even a _person_ then. How’s fate got a clue about your other half?”

“This is getting awfully depressing,” Mary Beth commented under breath, her own mark the pleasant gray of a person unknown. “I’d rather the books. Even if one option leads to half a pair dying.”

“You better not be the half that bites it,” Karen ribbed her again, “unless your other half’s another hundred dollars.”

“I’m worth at least a thousand!”

“You’re worth whatever’d take us far from this roundup. Swear I’m going to puke the next time the wind shifts and carries that stench into our clothes.”

Tilly and Abigail echoed in agreement. 

Five days later, the New Yorkers and their lockboxes of cash arrived. An Irishman arrived with them, having fancied the same heist as Dutch on account of one New Yorker having ties to an English trading company that had hiked prices beyond reasonable for the emerald isle. The collision between outlaws became a joint effort after a short, delightful night and not as many beers as one would suspect, as Dutch and the Irishman found they had plenty in common when it came to political ideology and the viability of revolution. Thereafter, an offer of continued employment and vagrancy was made to the Irishman. 

He accepted. 

He followed them to camp. Joined them at camp, rather, weaponry, a misappropriated horse and burlap sack of clothing and trinkets the only items to his name.

And, on his mark warming from washed out to vibrant, on Karen going stock-still in her pursuit of finding the bottom of a whiskey with Pearson, he stopped dead in his tracks and declared, the shimmer of a thread drawn between them, “Is that the devil I see? Because that’s the only match fit for me.” 

“At least we can rest assured she won’t die,” Mary Beth told Tilly not two days later, as Karen abandoned her chores to chew Sean out about absolutely nothing other than how the two of them were fighting the inevitable, “seeing as she’s on the other path of bickering for an age before giving in to her heart’s true desire.”

Tilly snorted, working out yet another stubborn stain-- this one, blood. The hole would need a patch, too, same as the patch they’d sewn shut in Arthur’s side after the cowboys he’d pretended to befriend took their lost pay out of his hide.

“It definitely doesn’t work like that.”

“But it _could_.”

* * *

When Arthur closed his eyes, he swore he could see it.

Thin as thread. Warm as a hearth made for a soul returning home after weeks away. A red loop, alive as a beating heart, tying two together by design, not mistake. 

He loved Eliza. He loved Isaac. 

He loved Mary.

Mary, who found her soulmate when they’d been sitting outside her town’s general store one bright, sunny day, and had turned to him with big, watery eyes. She’d looked her happiest and her saddest-- and, over both, so bone-deep relieved that it broke his heart. Because the other man had inspired it; because he had no hope of giving her that; because he’d never been enough, and her family had made that known to him but he’d deluded himself into thinking maybe, _maybe,_ she could be to him as Bessie was to Hosea. As Annabel had been to Dutch.

She hadn’t.

Splitting up was only the proper thing to do, she’d told him, contrite but not so regretful. Maybe the soulmates he knew didn’t demand it, but the average person had no room left in their heart after meeting their match. He had to know that, she groused, exasperated as yet another _perfectly normal_ American custom flew right over his head. He knew enough to not expect her to apologize, and she didn’t. Not really. For a moment - when he’d collected the spare things he’d kept in her room and left through the front door, which she’d rarely let him use as it was -, a shadow grew between her eyebrows and her mouth turned down and she’d gathered her hands ( _bright red on her pinky_ ) to her chest, shoulders strung tight and bottom lip caught between her teeth. Poised as if she wanted to call him back before he left for good, as was proper. 

He remembered how she looked in that last moment better than he remembered anything else. Of it, he most remembered how he’d paused on the last step, looking back-- waiting. 

Hoping.

She hadn’t apologized. She hadn’t called him back.

She’d said, “Farewell, Arthur,” and, “Take care.”

“You too,” he’d said, as if he weren’t being thrown out like rotten leftovers. As if he hadn’t fooled himself into love yet again.

The self-loathing lingered longer than the love. Eliza hadn’t the time to make him feel too rabid to be let in the house; she and Isaac had been gone like smoke, too fast to truly appreciate the shape or breadth of what they offered. Their memories caught in his throat instead, choking him for every breath he took and they didn’t.

Yet. Step by step, he moved on. Buried them, and swept forward.

Hosea helped. Dutch helped. They gave him purpose. Goals. A reason to not eat his gun for breakfast, lunch or dinner.

“This is your brother,” Dutch told him a year after Eliza and Isaac’s passing, years before he met Mary, “that you’re going to take for a ride, and find a pony for, seeing as we’re lacking in anything suitable for his height.”

John Marston was more bone than muscle and more spite than life. His expression was a permanent scowl, half-hidden though it was by a curtain of greasy, unkempt hair.

“We got money for a pony?” Arthur had asked. Squinted at John, at how Dutch’s hand dwarfed his boney shoulder. What he really meant was: _we got money for another mouth to feed?_

But Dutch had declared him family. Where it came to family, they’d make the money if they didn’t have it. 

“Use your problem solving skills, Arthur. I know you’ve got it in you.”

“I can get my own damn pony,” John’d said then, his voice cracking half-way through. His cheeks blotched pink. Arthur, not knowing much about children beyond the age of three, wondered if John had all his adult teeth. He wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that he didn’t.

Dutch had grinned down at him, giving his waif-sized shoulder a shake and saying, “Of course you can, son, he’s just here to make sure you got the power of persuasion on your side, need be,” and Arthur knew right then and there that he was fucked. That John was a rescue and a _cause_ for Dutch, same as Arthur’d been; that John was for Hosea’s need to teach and cultivate, same as Arthur’d been; that John was for Arthur to take care of, to watch over where he’d failed his own blood, and that best he might try, he was bound to screw it up.

When John chose them over chasing his soulmate, Arthur’d thought maybe he was wrong. Maybe he hadn’t fucked it up. Maybe his comments at the fire and his unintentionally intentional cold shouldering on the topic hadn’t ruined John’s chances at a good life, because John had them. Then John up and left his girl with a one-month old newborn, and the only _proper_ response to that was to get real, real drunk. There, at last, was how he’d done John wrong. John ran, same as Arthur’d ran from Eliza. Except John didn’t stop back in, not to drop off money or food or well-wishes or _anything._ Except he had been _Dutch’s_ , not just Arthur’s, and nobody left Dutch, not really. Nobody _had_ left Dutch, anyway. When Eliza had Isaac and they knew the boy to be Arthur’s, Hosea had hinted at Arthur leaving them for his newly made blood family. The idea of leaving the two who’d raised him — of leaving the life he’d learned he was decent at, hard though it could be — had been so unfathomable to Arthur, he’d stared blankly at Hosea and not caught his meaning until the man dropped his fancy words and said, _Let your child know he’s got a father, Arthur. Go be with them._

His tone of voice alone kept Arthr from laughing in his face. He’d asked, more shocked than incredulous, _You think I’d leave?_

Hosea shook his head. Told him, _Never mind it._ Told him, too, _Just saying you better visit them._

Of course he would. He’d gotten Eliza into the family way; least he could do was make sure she didn’t starve from it. Not to say he or she had enough to prosper, but they survived.

Sometimes he wondered if knowing him had made her trust outlaws too much. That because he fell for her, other rough men would, too. A ridiculous train of thought he entertained only in his lower moments, because he knew it hadn’t, that she hadn’t been so stupid as all that. It was just he hadn’t been around, she’d been too slow with her gun, and the outlaw who’d robbed her might’ve resembled him in profession but not in good sense for who made for a good mark. Whatever fucker had killed them had have been desperate. Arthur hoped whatever meal the sinner choked on whatever meal had been bought with their blood money.

More likely, the sinner died cold and alone in a ditch. Without Dutch and Hosea, Arthur knew his fate would’ve been the same.

But then, sometimes Arthur thought about what Dutch had. Sometimes Arthur saw it: Hosea, soulful red wrapped tight around entangled hands; idiotic sheriffs charmed by a smile and mastery executed to the detriment of those deserving a devil’s visit; men and women who fell silent at Dutch’s word, at his feet. How all went right for him one way or another, and by consequence, how it turned out alright for his. Arthur saw the rough, jagged paradise Dutch carved for himself in a world that wanted him and his dead, and felt like dosing himself in gasoline and stepping into a bonfire. It’d be kinder than the burn under his ribs, in his throat and on his tongue. Kinder than the vicious hatred alight in his soul, in his heart, in his very bones. Always, _always_ , the hate burned itself to embers and then to ash-- and he was left, hollowed out and threatened by the barest breeze. As he got older, he stopped hating; he never, however, felt entirely whole.

The grey never turned red. Not even the barest sheen.

He’d long decided he would’ve chopped it clean off if the damned mark didn’t keep circling higher and higher, bigger and bigger, from littlest finger to thumb to wrist to arm, up and up until it circled the heart it fed from. A missing arm wouldn’t rid a man of its blighted reminder. Though he was sure he was missing his heart on most days, the mark’s presence begged to differ. 

More than wanting to chop it off, he wanted it to blacken. To _end._ Then he wouldn’t close his eyes or fall asleep and see the sad string fate strung for him. See it stretch from him, a red line straight from his beating heart, and into darkness thick enough to choke. Never did he see who stood on the other end. Only that there must have been someone, unknowable though they insisted on being. His other half was out there. His other half was a bastard or a bitch or the worst of both wrapped into one, and he wished with every part of him that they were living a simple, peaceful, long life that he would never have the chance to ruin.

(John came back, but too late for Arthur to think it due to strength of character, no matter what the others said. 

Five months after his disappearance as Arthur came to accept John-- his brother, Dutch’s son- wasn’t coming back, Arthur had escorted Abigail and Jack to the local hotel for a break from camp. Abigail had kissed him on the threshold; had left a sleeping Jack on the bed and paid a smirking receptionist for them to use the private bath; had scratched red marks down his back and breathed _John_ in his ear, and Arthur was sure the gray around his finger was actually a window to the cold cinders that made up his heart. Because John had been his; because John had been hers; because John had the chance to find his other half before he’d fallen in love with anybody else, and Arthur had fucked it up out of his own selfish need for John to stay. 

It wasn’t the last time he fucked her. It was the one he remembered when he saw the two of them bite and bark at each other in camp after John’s return. She slept with more folk than him during that time, he knew. Far as he was aware, he was the only one she went back to, but all that meant was Dutch’d used the same mold to make him as he’d used to make John.

John, they didn’t tell. He suspected, maybe, but there was nothing except his self-serving, hurting heart to tell him she’d been in the wrong. After all, he’d left. 

_After all_ , the two of them weren’t even soulmates. Fidelity was owed to a match, not a fleeting fancy of the fickle heart. No matter they were all but married, no matter the boy, no matter Abigail took John back and neither again strayed to any other.)

At times, Arthur dreamed of fate’s red thread.

As he grew, he stopped looking into the dark for where it ended. Instead, he took care of those within reach.

* * *

A rancher with a bad temper and loose whip with his animals once told Arthur how, in Europe’s ancient days, armies were made entirely of matched soulmates. He described the story as Arthur helped him fetch a new horse to replace the one tied to his wagon and dead from exhaustion. The idea of the army, he claimed, was that a person would fight with tenfold the vigor if they were protecting their one and only. The best example of the good that pressure did involved a tragic love story about Achilles and his beloved, who had a name absurd enough Arthur forgot it part way through hearing it. The story was more confusing and illogical than a maze drawn in the sand by a three year old, but Arthur listened enough to understand the moral: revenge was an act of love best served with passion, desiviceness, and with absolute prejudice. Arthur pretended to agree, and then took his own revenge for being forced to sit through such a backwards tale-- as well as revenge for the horse dead, its ribs clear as it laid to rot where it fell, its eyes filled with flies and mouth foamed yellow with flecks of red-, and robbed the rancher of the goods he’d painstakingly transported.

He’d told Dutch and Hosea the story later that evening over the fire. They had been camping together longer than usual, what with the addition of Miss Grimshaw, Davey, and, of course, Johnny boy. Things were changing. The camp dynamic was changing. All for the better, Arthur thought: no longer did Hosea stay away with Bessie for quite so long, nor did Dutch pass up opportune jobs because they lacked the men. Word was, once John’s growing pains eased and his hand steadied enough with his pistol that nobody had to worry about getting their head blown off by their designated look-out, they’d hit a passenger train. The prospect excited Arthur, restless young gunslinger that he’d been; certainly, it seemed much more than the hit-or-miss cargo trains they stowed away on during the night and had to jump off of between stops with only what they could carry. Dutch’s assurances that their gang was the perfect size and skill to make the job an easy one didn’t hurt his exictement any, either.

(The prospect still excited him; but rare was it he trailed after _Dutch_ through the shaking cars of a passenger train, and jobs didn’t seem to be near as easy or predictable when he was the one leading them.)

Dutch had heard of Achilles’ tale and knew it well enough to correct Arthur on a number of points-- most pointedly that Achilles’ match had been named Patroclus, and that it was on Patroclus’ death by an enemy’s hand that Achilles went mad ( _not_ , as the rancher led Arthur to believe, because some God named Zeus decided Patroclus was his to marry). He hadn’t heard so well about the all-soulmate army. 

“There may be fact to that myth,” Dutch mused, flicking the ash from his cigar into the campfire. “Fascinating to think the battlefield’s glory called to them loud enough to drown out their good sense of self- and soul-preservation.”

“Reckon their lord or lady called louder than any glory. Would be a mighty small army if it were based in volunteers.” 

Smoke eddied from the corner of Hosea’s mouth as he spoke, a cigar that matched Dutch’s stuck between his teeth. He drew a breath from it, the end glowing red bright enough to match the coil around his finger. He and Dutch sat far enough away the thread wasn’t visible, though a glance over the fire spoke loud as fate’s string. 

“Very true, old friend.” Dutch added, apparently entertained by the idea of ancient peoples being stupid enough to throw themselves and their hearts in the way of swords when no end boded well for them.

Hosea flicked the ash from his cigar. Dutch, perhaps in unconscious echo, raised his back to his lips. 

Hosea said, as if it were a thing he knew for fact rather than something he’d undoubtedly made up on the spot, “Matches may be the natural way of things, but sticking your own on a battlefield can’t possibly be.”

Arthur wouldn’t know. He did know, however, and faintly accused: “You two run jobs together all the time. No telling what’ll happen on most of them. Could be somebody feels heroic and pulls a gun or knife.”

“And I think about that every damn time,” Dutch said, abruptly somber, “but not just about Hosea. I think about it for all of you.”

“That’s why we plan before we shoot,” Hosea added, his tone light, “where we can, anyway. You hear that, John?”

John, who’d been trying to look as if he hadn’t been hanging on their every word from the bedroll that he’d laid on and declared he wanted to sleep, could they all _keep it down_ , visibly winced. Even grumbled, face mostly in his pillow, “I hear it.”

“You won’t bag a deer you’ve scared off while shooting at coyotes.”

John lifted his head and squinted their way. Drawled, cheeky bastard he was, “No deer if a coyote’s got it first, neither.”

“The only one spooked by the coyote had been you, boy.”

“Saw you jump, too, Hosea.”

“I’d blame that on the rifle fired an inch from my ear, not the coyote minding its business in the brush.”

“Is that why we’re eating rabbit, not deer?” Davey asked.

“Seems so,” Susan sighed.

“You can’t deny you and Hosea work best together,” Arthur dogged at Dutch, the topic wiggling like a worm in his brain. “On a job, you two move like you’re sharing thoughts, not just souls. Figure that’d be rather helpful in any scrap, whether it’s big as a war or small as a brawl.”

Hosea looked at Dutch with an expression that said he wouldn’t be the one taking Arthur’s blatant bait. Dutch didn’t glance away from Arthur for a second. He looked at him as if he were being small-minded and stupid, which didn’t feel too grand. It made Arthur want to slink off to his own bedroll and escape into sleep, even though he _knew_ he was speaking the truth. 

“Obviously, yes, we work well together. We’ve the experience.”

“And the match.”

“It isn’t easy as all that.”

“Seems so,” Arthur muttered, his willpower to dispute withering under Dutch’s frown.

Dutch killed the last of his fight by saying, in a genuine attempt to get it through Arthur’s thick skull that just because they made it look easy didn’t mean it was, “Neither science nor story have fully explained the workings of a soulmate for a _reason_ , Arthur. Fate’s fickle in everything it does, whether it’s deciding the circumstances of a man’s birth or the fixation of his soul. If it were any other way, why, freedom would be a fool’s fallacy.”

He paused.

Everybody paused. Watched him. Waited, the fire’s crackle and spit as a log broke and sparks rose the only disturbance in the darkening night.

When he continued, it was with the beginnings of a smile. The frown lightened then disappeared. Arthur found himself lightening up, too; and, in the same breath, unsure of what exactly he’d been worried about Dutch saying or doing just because he gave a little push-back on an absurd idea. 

Dutch said, “Might do for an army to be full of pairs, but in our line of work? Hell. Already enough trouble sneaking out after dark when that damned thread starts glowing bright as the sun.”

“Every time,” Hosea groused, hopping in easy as ever to further brighten the mood. “Never have found gloves that block it out. Starting to wish for scissors, personally. Would rather clip it and put an end to the whole business than hear another clown be so proud of themselves for thinking up, _hah! I caught you red-handed_.”

Amicable once more, they all shared a groan. Arthur recalled off the top of his head no less than three separate occasions Dutch and Hosea sticking within arm’s reach of each other on a job had been the difference between being recognized and not spending an evening in the dog house. Much to Dutch’s mock offense and everyone else’s amusement, Hosea ran through an absurd, half-true list of the various devices and tonics they’d tried to dim the string’s glow. Only good it gave, Hosea said, was for late-night reading. Only hell it made, Dutch countered, was trying to fall asleep while it burned less than a foot away from his closed eyes.

Susan’s mark was the dull red of a soulmate found and left. She sent letters every month where possible, Arthur knew. She was bedridden and frequently ill in mind and body after a house fire robbed her of her family; Susan had stayed at her side for as long as she’d been allowed, before her soulmate drove her away for - her match’s words - _her own good_. Davey’s was black. Arthur’s and John’s, grey. That night, after the laughter and fire dimmed and Davey retired his harmonica in favor of sleep, Arthur would think on the soulmate army. He’d think it insane. An idea better suited for a story than reality. Pairs would care only for their matches’ safety. It would be an army of deserters, if any stayed at all.

(Dutch and Hosea were exceptions to the general rule, always.)

After that night, he forgot the rancher and his ancient tales of armies long past. Didn’t forget the skin-and-bones of the horse left to decay after giving its life for an ungrateful master, but that felt a story with more relevant a moral to Arthur’s life than anything about pairs marching to die together.

He forgot the tale until Dutch rode in from a trading town with a new brother trailing behind him. The man had been accused of kidnapping a white woman a week prior and town over, and threatened with the law. The man denied it, though the gentleman making the accusations had both a variety of specific, damning details about the situation as well as the townsfolk’s immediate support. Dutch, perusing goods a stall away from the altercation, stepped in, acting the man and allegedly missing woman’s friend both, and sweeping him out of town before the crowd decided to fetch either law or rope.

The two got to talking, as Dutch and those he found interesting always did. Turned out the man had kidnapped the white woman, if helping her escape from a monster of a soulmate constituted kidnapping. He’d been paid handsomely in the monster’s inheritance, which the woman claimed to be rightfully hers to do with as she pleased, and what she pleased was it finding a more deserving home in the hands of the man who delivered her safely to her cousin’s cabin.

A strange story, to be sure. The man, who identified himself as Charles Smith, admitted he’d been in it because he had the brains to tell her that the reason he’d climbed her estate’s fence and started talking to her was not because of her crying in her garden, but because he’d been in the midst of fleeing a robbery and needed a place to lie low.

“Could see the yard was a mess from the road. I’d thought a hermit might live there. Someone unlikely to answer the door, or if they did, someone unfriendly to strangers.” 

This, in response to Hosea, who greeted the two at the hitching posts and received the two sentence version of the story from Charles. The rest of the camp -- save Bill, an addition of two months and general layabout, and the Reverend, absorbed as he was in singing to himself by his tent -- looked on in vague curiousity, all wondering to varying degrees whether this one would last. Hopefully he would; a handful recalled the failed attempts at integration, including the scramble to find a pig pen before dawn’s light. Their attitudes were enough to set those who didn’t know on edge.

“Quick thinking, all around,” Dutch said, jovial; then, in the next breath, “Arthur! Where are you, son? I’ve someone I’d like you to meet.”

John gave him a _look_ across the card table. Uncle had busted out after a spectacular bet that landed him nothing. Pearson had folded,his elbows on the table and head heavy in his hand as he watched the two remaining players side-eye each other over the meager pot. 

“This don’t mean you won,” Arthur told John as he threw his hand down and pushed himself up, “just that you’re lucky I got to go.”

“Oh, come on,” John protested. “Play your hand. Dutch can wait two seconds.”

“Play again later, fellers. Guess the pot’s yours, Marston. Congratulations on the hollow victory.” Arthur tipped his hat with a smirk he didn’t bother hiding from John, turning away as he jumped from his seat to check Arthur’s cards. From what he saw, he cursed Arthur for, yelling at his back about winning the game fair and square. Pearson laughed and made note of Arthur being right about a victory handed over hardly being a victory at all. What John responded, Arthur didn’t hear, as by then he was more focused on the newcomer.

 _The interloper_ , as Arthur liked to think of them for the first few months while the camp figured out if they were as good a fit as Dutch thought (more often than not, Dutch was right and they were, but the camp was nothing if not hungry for new gossip). Thing was, Dutch picked them up faster than he used to. Bill was still fairly fresh and not exactly integrated, and they were already bringing on another? Broad-shouldered man with a scarred face, too, meant Arthur’d be doing the vetting. Not that it was _really_ vetting, as Dutch had final say in whether the person stayed on or not. He was more akin to quality assurance and skill spotting.

Dutch was a fine judge of character, so it usually went fine.

Usually. Cliff, a buck-toothed gunslinger with a lip looser than any of them had thought, was an unwelcome, not-yet-year-old memory.

One glance-over of Charles Smith, and Arthur knew: Dutch did right by this one.

“Mr. Smith,” Dutch said with a grandiose sweep of his hand between the two, “meet Mr. Arthur Morgan. You have trouble here and can’t find me, take it to him. One might say he’s quite the skilled negotiator.”

“Which is the nice way of saying I’m the head nursemaid,” Arthur said, smile reserved but hand stuck out amiably. “Nice to meet you.”

“Nice to meet you,” Charles echoed, expression even more reserved than Arthur’s. He took Arthur’s hand. A firm grip, one strong shake, _can tell a man by his handshake, and this one was solid._ Just as easy, they--

Froze.

Though he’d spent more years of his life than not watching Hosea and Dutch clasp hands entangled in the thread’s red warmth, Arthur understood only then what Hosea meant about it being a beacon. It drew his eye as a lighthouse alerted a ship on a moonless night: a hope and a warning rolled into one. What Hosea hadn’t mentioned was that it felt how it looked -- that it settled as freshly made stew in an empty stomach after a long ride, as a hand buried in a dog’s soft scruff, as the comfort of a quilt that smelled like firewood and endearment. That the sensation began in the littlest finger but traveled up, spread out, from their joined hands to his arm to as high as his elbow-- and would have kept going, he knew suddenly, if he pulled Charles in closer. And, oh, hell if he didn’t want to pull him in closer.

If it always felt like that, it was no wonder Hosea had tried everything to block the feeling while they were on a job. There was no thinking beyond it.

Same as when Dutch handed him John Marston to stand alongside through thick and thin, he knew: he was fucked.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> still figuring out Charles' voice. hope it reads alright!
> 
> anyhow, enjoy :) thanks to all who've read and reviewed, it means more than I can say!

Most met their soulmate by sixteen years of age. 

Despite how the unfortunate raved and the bitter complained, fate wasn’t often as cruel as people thought. Most matches occurred within a community; if not within an immediate town, then within fifteen miles; if not within fifteen miles, then within the first few travels a wanderlust-filled soul had. Tragedy struck, yes-- but more often than not, man made the circumstances that stole away a soulmate before they met. Fate had little to do with the affairs of the cruel.

Charles witnessed as much with his own parents. They’d been happy and whole as they could be until his mother had been stolen away.

(Granted, he scarcely _remembered_ his mother, let alone how his father treated her. He remembered her smile, if not the sound of her voice; he remembered her lessons, if not her hands; he remembered his father ignoring the bottle to dance with her by the fire, and that felt proof enough.)

Sixteen, for Charles, came and went without fanfare or especial note. Too busy learning how to survive without anyone -- miserable drunkard or not, his father had _tried_ to remember him -- to care especially about what color his mark turned. If pressed (he never was), he would have said he was glad he didn’t have to worry about feeding anyone except himself. Damn if he didn’t do a relatively poor job of that in the beginning, as was.

Occasionally he would have a halfway decent job and a halfway full coin purse. Then he had the time to ponder on soulmates. No worrying or fretting, as it seemed far out of his hands whether the grey would turn red or black. But wondering, yes. Musing, sometimes: what it would be like to know he belonged without question. What it would be like for fate to say, as definitely as anything in life, that _yes, here, you are known._

He didn’t let himself linger in the what-ifs for long. That was a guide to following in his father’s footsteps, wherein he skipped the part with a family and dived straight to the bottle.

In any case, time went on.

Time went on so long, he hadn’t noticed his mark warming as he trailed behind Dutch van der Linde, though it must have. Too busy was he in working out if Dutch’s sincerity in offering him a long-term job was true. Too absorbed was he in thinking about what to do if it _wasn’t._ Take it one step at a time, he told himself; for even if Dutch was genuine and even if he exuded the charisma befitting a leader, there was no predicting what sort of company he kept. Though Dutch seemed the opposite of _apathetic_ on all fronts, Charles had been tricked into relaxing by well-meaning but indifferent men before.

Not so with Dutch, who tolerated no bigotry around his camp. 

A damn good thing, too. 

Charles had walked away plenty from the good, the bad, and the in-between. He was sure he _could_ walk from his soulmate, but he was also sure he would no longer be able to pull himself away from wondering, _What if this could be a home?_

At the thread’s first appearance, looped loose and free between their clasped hands, he wondered it. A stray thought. A beautiful curiousity.

Then Arthur dropped his hand like it were a hot coal, stepping back fast until the red ring around their fingers was the only sign the string had been there at all, and he knew he was wrong.

Later, he’d wonder if he had been wrong, too, about fate’s whimsy not acting with the same measured cruelty as the men it moved.

Dutch and Hosea made themselves startlingly scarce after that. Told Arthur to see Charles to his tent. Clasped a hand, red-ringed as well, on Arthur’s shoulder, as if to say _good luck_ \-- and then, just like that, left the two to their own devices. Most anyone with an imagination envisioned what their first interaction with their soulmate, should they be so lucky as to find them, would be. Charles was no exception. Neither, more likely than not, was Arthur.

Their first interaction went like this:

Arthur, head turned away from Charles. 

Charles, frozen in wary observation of Arthur.

Arthur, adjusting his hat, clearing his throat, and saying, “Mr. Smith, was it?”

“Charles is fine,” he said, though even as he said it, he knew it wasn’t.

Arthur nodded all the same. He would not be using _Charles._

(Not at first, anyway.)

“Welcome,” he said, voice tight and gaze yet averted. “Come on this way, then. Best you meet what men and morons you’ll be trusting your back to in the coming week.”

“What’s in the coming week?”

“Maybe something, maybe not. Nothing big, either way. Hosea’ll let you know when he’s got the details worked out.”

He led Charles away from the horses and along the camp’s outskirts, then. Spoke on how they divided pulls from work-- half to the camp, then even split between those participating. Dutch had explained that on the ride to camp, though he’d talked it up as the best deal Charles would ever find. From Arthur, it sounded less like a deal and more the way any job should be. A fact of life, in other words.

Charles let him talk. Trailed a step behind him, let the words wash over him. As he’d largely forgotten to keep imagining after he (to his surprise) lived past his twenties, he had never envisioned anything too grandiose in meeting his soulmate. Meant he had no questions or thoughts at the ready. Meant his mind on the subject fuzzed out, as if padded with cotton. Meant he focused on what he was being told and not just the man doing the telling, same as any other group he’d ran with, few and temporary though they were.

“You ever hear about Achilles?”

The question came out of a spot of terse silence following his introduction to _the ladies_ : Tilly, Karen and Mary Beth, who all greeted him politely but all also looked ready to eat him alive if he didn’t behave himself. As he struggled to memorize which woman matched which name (and privately, as was habit from the life he led, wondered if he’d stick around long enough for the names ot matter), he couldn’t imagine having the inclination toward pestering them. 

The first sentence unrelated to the camp’s people, their rules, or work Charles would be expected to do to pay his keep. 

Reminded abruptly of gleaming red, it gave Charles pause. 

Arthur watched him from over his shoulder. A sidelong, lingering look that furthered his pause; and, in the same breath, cut it short.

As he didn’t think Arthur meant the tendon and the awkwardness between them would have quashed any good from humor, he could only answer, “Who?”

Arthur glanced away. Muttered, “Old… war story. Not important. Never mind it.” 

They stopped by a dark green tent, two bedrolls and not much room to spare already laid out within. Face turned away from Charles and half-hidden by his hat besides, Arthur gestured at its meager paradise with a short, clipped wave. After, his hands fell to his sides, hovering with the restlessness of one who hated not knowing what to do with them. He said, “Anyway. You can drop off your stuff here. You’ll be rooming with Lenny, who usually takes third shift for patrol, and Javier, who knows his way around well enough to answer any questions you might have.”

Charles nodded his understanding.

Arthur nodded back, mirroring.

For an uncertain moment, the two watched each other. A dozen paths forward stretched from the moment, heavy and full as it was of possibility. 

Just as Charles picked one to walk, Arthur started down his first. He tipped his hat to Charles, ducked his head, and said, gruff in the universal sign of _I got better things to do_ , “I’ll leave you to it.”

In five words, the possibilities dried up. The paths turned to cliffs, a dead-end that threatened quite the fall if pushed. 

Charles, not one to fight fate, said, “Sure. Nice meeting you.”

Arthur made a non-committal, _yup_ noise, hands clenching and relaxing as though he had to force himself to say even that much, and-- _just like that_ \- left.

After the thread had strung between them, Dutch had absently redirected Charles to Javier. _Know this development can be a lot on top of everything else,_ he’d explained away, not appearing or sounding too concerned about his gang’s acceptance of a newcomer. Rather, his thoughts obviously rested elsewhere. On a separate, unexpected problem, and one he clearly wasn’t sure he liked. It was the first time Charles saw him frown in genuine disapproval; though he didn’t fully grasp its target or merit, he knew then Dutch van der Linde was not a man to cross. By how his eyes pinned on Arthur, not Charles, it didn’t take much to imagine where.

Complicated didn’t suit Charles. Messes were complicated. Nature was simple. Survival was simple. No strife too difficult to solve within a week rose from simple.

Problem was, people were never simple.

While Charles had long avoided _people,_ fate refused him so simple a life.

* * *

The first time Sean kissed Karen was the second day he knew her.

The first time Karen slapped him, as it just so happened, had not been because of the kissing, or the necking, or the groping, or the shagging. They both agreed those were perks unrelated to what mattered. Funny how they agreed even when they didn’t. Almost like being two halves of the same whole.

And that, right there, was the cause of Karen finally giving in to slapping him. 

“Fuck you,” she’d said, “you might be my match, but I’m a delight whether I’ve got you on a string or not.”

“Think it’s the other way around, my lovely she-devil,” Sean shot back, merry as could be. “If anybody’s heart is tied up, it isn’t mine. Though, between you and me, the existence of a beating heart in the black abyss you call a chest is still in question.”

 _That_ got him a strike right across the cheek. That had been a month in to their knowing each other, and his joining the gang. Carried a hand-sized mark for two days, he did. His girl certainly packed a wallop; he imagined she could lay out a horse if she closed her first.

It was then, and only then, he knew he’d follow her to the ends of the earth. 

He told her as much, too, after he’d gotten his breath back from her kneeing him in the groin. To be fair, she’d kneed him because he’d shoved her, except he’d shoved her because she slapped him, and she slapped him because he’d said what he said. He’d said what he said because a string was one thing, but a man had to know the line before he could decide he was comfortable. Even after he’d decided he was happy as a clam indeed, however, he knew it didn’t do to _tell_ a woman you’d follow her to the ends of the earth. Not immediately, anyway. Wasn’t a light thing, promising ends-of-the-earth adoration. Took time to build that up.

So, he told her a month after the slap, which was two months after their first kiss and their knowing each other. She’d near brained him with her bottle of her whiskey, she’d been so elated and so annoyed that he’d _say_ it aloud.

An all-around fantastic deal, he thought. He’d always made fun of soulmates - the stories, the tales, the doe-eyed looks and serenading from balconies, it never seemed real.

“Serves me right for knocking it before I tried it,” he told Lenny, a then fresh and meek boy with his nose stuck ever in a book despite his hands being better with a knife than most anyone in camp. “This soulmate thing? Not so bad. Far be it for me to say the high and mighty got something right, but they definitely were on to something when they made matches the cornerstones of society.”

“Heard you the first fifty times,” Lenny grumbled, because he was a boy and _hadn’t_ yet the opportunity to try it. “Karen decide to bring you along one of her jobs in town again?”

“That she did,” Sean said, his grin ear-to-ear. “Should’ve seen the idiots she flushed out of that saloon. And how we charmed the bartender into letting us back in! Got us free rounds on the house for taking out the troublemakers. Didn’t need to know we was the one starting the ruckus.”

“Sounds great.”

Drawled sarcastically, but Sean saw the smile edging into Lenny’s expression. 

“Next time, you’ve got to join us,” he said, clapping Lenny on the shoulder and jostling him firmly from his book. “With your baby face, my quick wit and her quick fingers, we’ll make twice a killing.”

“Sure, alright,” Lenny said, trying for casual and failing miserably. He was still finding his footing in the gang-- and Sean remembered that very well (though mostly he remembered Karen’s baby blues). Seemed only right to throw him whatever bone he could rustle up, especially as Hosea came down hard on the kid for no real reason Sean could see. Something to do with Hosea being so old and Lenny being so young, maybe. The elderly were always toughest on the ones they thought would most surpass them. “Just name the time.”

“So quick! That’s the spirit.” Sean beamed. “Though I feel it right to warn you, best think twice about if you’re really up for town with Karen and me. We always go for a good time, and we always get what we go for.”

Lenny did join them the next time they went to town. Turned out he couldn’t hold his liquor to save his life, but also that he made for a happy, carefree drunk who wasn’t afraid to make new friends (and then back up his old friends when the new ones accused Karen of robbing them). So, it worked out just fine. 

Sean had given the same treatment to Williamson when he’d arrived. Invite him for a drink in town, that time with Pearson rather than Karen. Went splendidly in the opposite direction as drinking with Lenny, which was to say: Pearson cleaned up at poker and made a few folks mad at his superior ability. Bill started a fight over their disparaging Pearson’s name, which gave Sean the opportunity to grab the winnings and a free bottle of beer before the three had to make themselves scarce.

Turned it into a tradition with Micah. That night escalated into a brawl faster than Sean had time to get shit-faced, which put it distinctly lower on the _good times_ bar than Bill’s or Lenny’s initiation, but never let it be said Sean shied from a scrap. 

Just as soon as he could boast about it being a tradition to Dutch, however, Smith showed up.

As was to be tradition, Sean waltzed himself up to his side by the end of his tenth day in camp. Smith had done a small-time job with John in fencing a stagecoach, and passed his unspoken test in vagrancy just fine. Sean hadn’t thought too hard about inviting him for a drink in Blackwater. He lived his life moment-to-moment, thank you very much; and anyway, inviting a man to drinking after a job well-done was hardly _revolutionary._

Except Smith got his invite, scrunched his nose, and asked, looking at Sean like he was a fly in his beer, “Why?”

“Why?” Sean sputtered. “What do you mean, why? To celebrate, of course!”

By the light frown on his face, Smith didn’t follow.

Sean wasn’t to be so easily deterred. He barreled on, bemused and bewildered but not daunted by the lack of expected reaction, “You’re in, then? Fantastic! Blackwater’s ”

Smith’s frown deepened. “I didn’t say that.” 

Sean beamed at him. Tossed an around around his shoulders. Said, “You haven’t a choice, my dear sullen friend.”

Smith shrugged off his arm, hard. 

Sensing a need for tactical retreat, Sean put his hands up and worked damage control. “Whoa, okay, okay! You have a reputation as the grouchiest feller to protect, I see. Don’t you worry, Charlie; you’ve convinced me well and good that you are not one to party with, even more so than our Arthur Morgan.”

Predictably, that caused Charles to turn on a heel and leave. Looking after the sourpuss and reflecting with what he now knew on top of what he had seen-- that was, a lot of sulking around from their newest gunslinger-, Sean wasn’t too surprised. Feller clearly didn’t know a good time, even if it slapped him in the ass. _However_ , hearing from Karen who heard from Tilly who heard from Susan who saw the thread materialize with her own two eyes that Smith was none other than _Arthur Morgan’s_ soulmate, now-- _that_ was a surprise.

In retrospect, it was insanity it took more than ten days after Charles’ arrival for Sean to put two and two of the soul-related whisperings together. Especially as after he registered what Karen said and started sleuthing on his own, Arthur’s steadfast avoidance of their newest camp member was obvious as the rising sun. That folk didn’t hassle Arthur over skirting around his soulmate spoke to the respect he was owed, as well as just how glum the issue made him.

So, naturally, a day after the failed attempt to take Charles to town for a pickling, Sean pulled Arthur aside and said, grin a mile wide, “ _Really?_ ”

Arthur didn’t do more than spot his expression before scowling out a, “Careful now, MacGuire.”

“We need more hooch, big man,” Sean replied, happily hopping over Arthur’s dismissal, “and I want you and Mr. Smith to accompany me in replenishing our most vital supplies.”

Arthur’s expression shuttered down into doom and gloom before his very eyes. _Boy_ , but did Morgan get stuck in his own damn head far too often. 

He drawled, each word slow and drawn, “Subtle as always, ain’t you,” as if it were some big insult. 

Sean kept his grin on and up. “Got the wagon ready to go. Invited our newest to town before, but funniest thing, seems he doesn’t respect me much. Can’t imagine why. Anyway, that’s why I need you to ask him to go.”

“I’m busy,” Arthur grumbled, waving a hand at him and half-turning away. “And I’m sure many others here would be elated to help you fetch more liquor.”

Sean darted in front of him. Got a curled lip and narrowed eyes for his trouble, an expression that spelled much trouble. As with Charles, seeing it made him put his hands up, palms out, and try for placating. 

“Come on!” He wheedled with the confidence of someone who had wheedled their way into many a solution, especially where the solution rested upon wearing down a person’s resistance. “Everybody knows there’s nothing like drinking to bring folks together. He needs a proper welcoming. Imagine that’s the only way he’ll relax enough to pull the stick out of his ass.” Sensing victory as Arthur visibly paused, vague curiousity twinkling in his sad lonestar eyes, Sean pressed his advantage with a finger prodded into his shoulder. “And _you_! Don’t think nobody’s noticed how gloomy you’ve been since he’s shown up. Like a rain cloud that won’t go away, you are. We here appreciate the sun.”

Though his curiousity disappeared in his renewed disdain for Sean’s methods, Sean considered him not walking away a win. 

Knew it to be a _real_ win when Arthur asked, derisive, “Are we even out of liquor?” -- and then, as if he weren’t the biggest push-over in the west, glanced around until he spotted the wagon Sean had prepped. Lucky for Sean, the wagon hadn’t been a lie. It really was ready to go and fetch ambrosia for the Gods.

Sean said, “We can always use more,” and answered Arthur’s _how haven’t you been gutted yet_ grunt with beaming, _I’m too clever to die_ smile.

He really was the cleverest, he thought. Second only to Hosea, and only because Hosea had about a thousand years of experience on him.

“No defeating tradition, boys,” Sean sing-songed to them as he drove the wagon loaded with naught but two silently resigned soulmates-who-barely-were in the cart out of camp for a good romp on the town. Neither appreciated or understood his reference, nor seemed they willing to ask him about it. That was fine, as he filled the next five minutes of silence with explaining the tradition anyway. Thank fuck Blackwater had a decent tavern and liquor store, he privately thought, as neither broke their silence toward each other to chide him for rambling (perhaps normal for Charles, but not normal for Arthur, who enjoyed grumbling at him as if he were some hundred-year-old crone). They needed a good pickling to be even half-decent company. He imagined Charles a somber drunk, if only because he couldn’t imagine Charles any way but stone-faced and sulky, except for maybe _stone-faced and angry_. Luckily, he knew Arthur made for a fantastic drunk. Nights lost to the drink besides, never had he a ride to the local tavern with Morgan and failed to gain a good story for it. If all went well -- which was to say, if Smith really was a man worth riding alongside, his being tied to Arthur aside -- the two would balance each other, and leave plenty of room for Sean to make the night a smash.

As he pulled their wagon to a stop before the tavern, waving off Arthur’s unsurprised, “Thought we were getting enough for the camp,” he regretted only that Karen weren’t with them.

Karen staying behind was for the best, though. Arthur Morgan and Sean MacGuire already spelled trouble. Add in Karen Jones, and oh, devil preserve them-- the town wouldn’t have known what hit it. Dutch would’ve livid if they had to leave Blackwater _that_ soon.

* * *

There were worse places than a musty, hay-filled loft to wake in. When coordination was a distant dream and every small shift led to the nauseous spike of one’s stomach threatening to empty its alcohol-soaked contents onto one’s makeshift pillow, however, there were few worse places than a hot, dry platform raised fifteen feet over the ground without water or a pot to piss in. Doubly worse: it wasn’t a barn Arthur recognized in the slightest (not that he had been privy to the insides of many barns in the last few weeks, fond as they were of highway robbery in the tree-filled area between Blackwater and Armadillo) _and_ the hayloft’s door had broken off its hinge, allowing late morning sunlight to pour directly into Arthur’s eyes.

Struggling to turn himself from his side to his back without riling his pounding headache worse than waking up already had, he tossed his arm over his squinted-open eyes to block out the cruel light. On its way, he caught sight of thin red. Thought nothing of it, concerned as he was about surviving the present. Every time he drank enough to forget the night, he swore to himself the morning after that he’d never do it again. Every month - more, if times grew rough; they hadn’t for the past year, thankfully -, he repeated the process. Worked himself through the stages of drunken grief: regret, anger, denial, false promises and, finally, resignation. Pepper in the aches and pains, the cotton mouth and cramps, the absolute misery, and there Arthur had yet another reminder he wasn’t as young as he used to be. 

Next to him, something shifted. Just as he started dreading he’d dragged livestock where it wasn’t meant to be-- he vaguely recalled betting an older man Sean had roped into their group for the night that he could lift a hog over his shoulders, though the particulars of why were lost- that something groaned a very human-sounding groan. 

The _someone_ then mumbled, closer than expected, “Arthur?” -- And, before Arthur could properly kick himself over _who_ the someone turned out to be, a pained, “Fuck, my head. I’m going to be sick.”

“Edge’s over there,” arm tensing over his eyes and body bracing for a wave of the worst.

Fortunately, Charles proved a better bedfellow than Sean. Slipping though he did on loose hay, Charles scrambled to the loft’s side, clambering over Arthur’s legs, before spilling his guts. As no animals made their disgust below, there was a fair chance they’d passed out in an abandoned barn. Unusual luck, for Arthur; a sign of smarter planning than drunks should ever be accredited with, most probably.

 _Romantic_ , came the sardonic thought as his own stomach jumped in response to Charles’ heaving. He swallowed and focused on breathing. In. Out. Deep, slow pulls.

With the unmistakable groan borne of a night most regretted, Charles sat back. For a moment, he set a hand on Arthur’s leg and leaned his weight there. Then the moment passed, and he seemed to realize what he was doing-- and so removed it, in favor of clunking his back against an old, moldy hay bale. His being relatively upright inspired Arthur to _attempt_ wakefulness. He lifted the arm from his face, anyway. Shoved himself back out of the morning light’s beam. Ended up bumping his head into a wall and wincing, feeling also the threatening poke of a in-need-of-hammering nail at his side.

His clothed side. Heavily clothed. Far too heavily clothed, as his jacket and shirt made him feel oven-baked and like he were swimming in old sweat at the same time. _Yet_ , despite those discomforts, he couldn’t help but feel relief as he noticed every article had managed to stay attached to his body. Except his left boot, which-- was _annoying_ more than anything. Hopefully it laid within hopping distance.

Nothing untoward had happened. Or if it had, it’d stayed above their clothes. No way had he been in any state to clean himself up, as evidenced by his lost boot.

(Even more a miracle: aside from a few scrapes on Arthur’s right knuckles - which could’ve come from anything, though he knew the scab pattern well enough to know he’d punched something -- on first glance, no bruise or blood blighted him or Charles. As he recalled starting the night in a stormy, disgruntled mood, unhappy with Sean _stopping for a quick pint!_ at the tavern despite the sun setting and the liquor store being a block away, that he didn’t wake with more aches than those made by alcohol consumed in excess was noteworthy enough for a journal entry.

Later, of course. When he could focus on something for longer than a second without wanting to crack open his skull to let some of the headache’s pressure out.)

Cramped as the loft was and close as Charles sat, their thread of fate laid and glimmered a faint red in the bright light between them. 

Tied, finger to finger. Through that, heart to heart. Fated.

Leaving it where it was, Arthur scrubbed his other hand over his face. Ignored the ache in his knuckles at the movement.

Charles seemed to be working on breathing, his head tilted back and eyes closed.

“Any clue where we’re at?” Arthur asked him, breaking their remarkably companionable silence.

“South of Blackwater.” A beat. “You don’t remember?” 

“I remember Sean thinking himself real funny,” _in playing around with Arthur’s fate,_ “when he challenged the bartender to a shooting contest with his own wares.”

Charles’s eyes cracked open. “Incredible we didn’t get thrown out sooner.”

“You telling me you remember?”

“Bits and pieces.”

Arthur dropped his hand. Ruminated on the black hole his memory became after polishing off the whiskey bottle, which had been around the time he’d climbed into the farmer’s wagon to go _lift a hog_. Or had it been _steal a hog?_ Latter made more sense. Supposed he’d find out which - and if they’d had any success - when he ran errands in Blackwater again. More clear was Sean staying behind; and, Charles climbing in the wagon next to him, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder. The warmth in his gut and in his heart, the two of them lit up like dynamite in a dark tunnel. The farmer’d commented on it. Said something about the unnaturalness of races mixing, fate’s whimsy be damned.

Ah.

 _That_ was why they’d never gotten to lifting any livestock.

Explained the busted up knuckles, too. Probably.

Arthur said, wry, “Not sure I should be envious or not.”

A grimace flitted across Charles’ face. “Think it’s more that I’m envious of you. Unless you recall the chicken?”

A beat.

“Can’t say I do.”

“That’s for the best.”

Arthur coughed a laugh. At Charles’ hasty avoidance of his eyes, a smile, unbidden, twisted up one side of his mouth. “What’d we do to a chicken?” 

“Nothing good.” But nothing bad enough that Charles sounded particularly ruffled. Though he hadn’t _directly_ spoken much with him, he’d carefully documented every overheard conversation and opinion he could drag from the rest of the camp on the matter of Charles Smith. Before Tilly started calling him on what he was doing with such words as _moon-eyed_ and _obvious_ , he’d gathered that he had a deep respect for the natural world (though it possibly didn’t extend to chickens, ridiculous domesticated birds that they were). Arthur could appreciate that. “Poor beast. Covered it in flour and let it loose in some banker’s house.”

Arthur sputtered. That was-- that was far nicer than things tended to go when he got too drunk, actually. Why, it was downright juvenile. 

“What for?”

Charles shrugged. “Ask Sean.”

“Don’t think I will, thank you.”

Charles’s lip twitched. Upward, Arthur was pleased to note.

Got so damned pleased with himself, he started staring. Caught on to his own stupidity only when Charles’ eyebrows pinched together and his fingers twitched closed. A muscle along his jaw jumped. Head still tilted back, he swallowed. 

Arthur watched the bob of his adam’s apple. Felt warm for a reason other than his being overdressed for their location. 

Between them gleamed fate.

Before Charles could say a thing, Arthur tore his eyes away. Set it fixedly on his bootless foot. Flexed his toes, which stretched his twice-darned sock.

“Need to find my shoe,” he muttered, clearing his throat and forcing himself to his knees and then up, to his feet. Had to hunch in the loft, swayed dangerously toward the open edge, his vision tilting and his head light as air-- but forced himself to stay on track and not look back, even as Charles murmured a, _No idea where that got to_. He waved a hand dismissively over the trouble of Charles even thinking about needing to help him, concentrating instead on getting down the ladder without face-planting. Hell knows he must have made himself look like enough of an idiot the night before to add more. To help ensure he didn’t throw kindling on _that_ fire, he’d keep his mouth shut, too. 

As it turned out, Charles didn’t mind silences.

As it just so happened, he didn’t face plant, and he found his boot right at the ladder’s base. 

As it went, they were less than an hour’s walk from camp. According to Charles, Arthur had insisted they stay in the barn because they’d been too drunk to check for followers, and he wasn’t about to lead the law to their home because they were having _too good of a night_. Even though he hadn’t been the one three sheets to the wind and in need of support just to walk, Charles had thought that smart, and agreed. He’d checked for other squatters after Arthur’d passed out, found none, and got them both situated in the relative, cloying comfort of the abandoned hayloft.

 _You carried me up the ladder?_ Arthur almost asked, impressive despite himself.

Bit it off because obviously, Charles had. If anybody could’ve lifted a hundreds-pound hog, it was probably Charles.

That-- gave rise to more than a few embarrassing thoughts, and so Arthur held his tongue. Put his boot on. Got his bearings enough to walk them in the direction of camp. 

Didn’t open his mouth again for the rest of the walk. Charles followed suit on all points, trailing a step behind him.

Hangover-inspired misery dogged their steps from the barn to the camp, so maybe it wasn’t too surprising they kept quiet. The ease was a rare quality, however. Arthur savored it as much as he was able to in his present condition (and then later, in the quartered off tent he claimed as his own, with a brushing of wary, _was it really that easy?_ ). 

Returning to camp forced him to push back his musings on what was and wasn’t true about Charles’ mood, which had returned to being a large mystery after leaving the barn, his expression flattened to its usual near-scowl. There was no time to contemplate the inexplicable when the resident Irish terrier, somehow whole and hale and lacking entirely in the gloom his drinking companions carried into the day after, started yapping at their heels about how sad he’d been to lose track of them, about what they missed with the crackshot bartender, about how they _had_ to drink together again.

Charles excused himself quietly in the face of Sean’s exuberance. Not quick enough to dodge a hearty back-pat and one-armed hug, which inspired a look of murder so clear on Charles’ face that Arthur felt the need to step in and haul Sean back lest he lose a limb. Deserved though the maiming would be, Dutch would be upset if they lost a gun-hand so soon.

Charles gave him an appreciative nod before making his escape toward the coffee kettle that Pearson was attentive and generous enough to re-heat on their return.

Sean called after him, “Strong and silent as ever, I see! Well! Another time, Charlie!”

“You finally pickle your brain bad enough to forget folks’ names, MacGuire? ‘Cause that ain’t his,” Arthur said, as if he’d asked Charles what he preferred (he hadn’t) and been expressly told (he definitely hadn’t).

To his great distaste, Sean spun on a heel to grin in his face. Sounding as the cat with the canary, he crowed, “ _That_ so? He tell you his preferences while you took a romp in the hay? Never took you for the considerate type, Arthur Morgan; have to say, I’m impressed. Maybe you aren’t as hopeless as I thought.”

He waggled his eyebrows, looking pointedly to where a few pieces of straw clung stubbornly to Arthur’s jeans. Arthur scoffed. As Sean didn’t need a scrap more encouragement and Arthur didn’t need the heckling before he’d returned to feeling human, he put his shoulders back and swayed himself into Sean’s space, snapping a low, “Quit while you’ve got all ten fingers attached,” before pushing past him toward his tent. Sean called a goodbye after him, obnoxiously gleeful. 

The bastard knew he’d done right in taking them out to town. Arthur knew he’d done right, too. Before, there’d been a… wall, almost. A canyon, more like. Something big and wide and impenetrable separating him and Charles. Turned out - not so surprisingly - liquor could pave even the most challenging chasms, if only for one night.

What broken beginnings of a bridge the night left behind-- was a start. 

(Now if only Arthur could believe it weren’t some fluke.)

* * *

Despite all attempts at respectful distance, Charles Smith proved a difficult man to avoid.

“Him inviting you everywhere is a problem for you and only you, Arthur,” Mary Beth tittered, clearly amused by his _sorry, I can’t escort you to town. Charles spotted a black bear that hasn’t settled down for winter just yet. Seems we’re always out of camp._

Though he knew she teased, he couldn’t help a vague frown. The way she said that made him wonder if he’d been leaving the camp to the vultures, so to speak. Pearson and Grimshaw appreciated their pickings, but they had stocked the food pile plenty high. If there was something else worth doing, he’d re-prioritize. Dutch and Hosea had been talking about buying some land and putting roots down in a discrete stronghold out west. Somewhere suitable for those less inclined to the gun, such as Jack, where they could nonetheless contribute in ferrying what goods needed moving. It would be Dutch putting his money where his mouth was, Hosea griped to Arthur; they’d been talking on making a paradise for so long, it was about time they did it. 

It wasn’t the first time Dutch had thought about carving out a base for them. For as long as Arthur had been with them, hell, it wasn’t even the second.

Therefore it was the distant, if ever, future. In the present, Arthur said, “Not a _problem_ , is it? I could--”

She flapped a hand at him, already turning away and setting her eyes on another set of muscle willing to act as the strong arm in case of soured business. “No, no! No trouble at all. I think it’s cute.”

“Cute?” Arthur echoed dumbly, unsure if he should be affronted instead of simply perplexed. “We’re just hunting, Mary Beth.”

“Sure.” She gave him a sly grin that he didn’t have a clue about what to do with. “Just hunting. That’s what I’d imagined you’d call it.”

With that, she left before he could sputter out an adequate protest. By the knowing glances Karen and Tilly shot him once Mary Beth reached their sides to share whatever nonsense gossip she’d drawn from a very normal conversation, Arthur decided to tip his hat down and find Charles before the whole camp conspired to make him feel like he were some tomcat slinking around instead of just another camp member pulling his weight.

Charles was in the process of saddling up Taima. Arthur caught his eye across the camp, gave him a little nod. Charles returned it, then re-focused on his horse. Nothing more or less than how Arthur would’ve greeted Javier, or Karen, or Lenny, or anybody else. Nothing stranger than the yesteryears when John and Arthur were the only spare hands around to go hunting. Carefully shoving away the part of him that wanted to marry Mary Beth’s words to the easy acknowledgment and start _wondering_ what it could mean, Arthur set off to collect Boadicea.

Except, Dutch waylaid him before he could make it to the hitching posts. 

“I’ve got work for you,” Dutch told him, words and expression packed with barely-bridled excitement. This was a Dutch with a plan grand enough to make himself inordinately pleased with himself. Well aware of how such plans went in the past, Arthur felt at once interested in the reward and weary at the cost. 

“Alright,” Arthur agreed to it, as anything but didn’t bear a moment’s consideration. “What is it?”

“Hosea’s weaseled out a plot of decent land on the cheap out in Utah. I need you and Abigail and her boy to head out there and make sure it’s everything as advertised.”

“Utah’s a hell of a ways,” Arthur said, his excitement brought up short. “What in the world would we be doing in Mormon country, anyway? Heard those folk aren’t too fond of strangers, and we’re about as strange as it comes. Why, I’d be surprised if they couldn’t smell the stench of Swanson’s sacrilege from a mile away.”

“They’re _Mormons,_ Arthur, not bloodhounds. Worst they do is have too many kids with too many spouses, which I don’t imagine becoming an issue with anyone around here.” Spoken with absolute disregard. It was close to a miracle Jack was the only child the women came down with, but speaking as if remaining barren were a foregone conclusion seemed an awful lot like tempting fate’s sense of dark irony. “Anyway, if money’s your concern, leave it. Hosea’s socked away enough fare for a train, food and board, there _and_ back. Seeing as it’s mostly his plan, he’s paying for it out of his own pocket. Altogether, shouldn’t take you three more than a month.”

That was still an absurd amount of time to be away from camp. Lot could happen in a month, good and bad. They were safe for the time being, but they were a bigger group than in years past, too. Arthur didn’t trust they’d stay quiet for long, and he certainly didn’t want to return only to ponder on what might’ve gone differently if he’d been around to lend a hand.

Moreover-- and, really, he should’ve brought it up right away, but he hadn’t really thought of its implications until too late-, “Why Abigail and Jack, exactly?”

“You’re a pair of tenant farmers who finally saved enough to move out of Alabama’s armpit. You’re looking for land of your own, to raise yourself and your family-- and any of your extended aunts, uncles, cousins, who you’ve had to leave behind for the time being but hope to reunite very soon with, God willing.”

Sounded like a lot of work for something Arthur wasn’t sure they needed. Their camp functioned fine as a base, he thought. But, then, there was a reason he didn’t call the big shots; Dutch often scolded him for being too small picture, and here, it seemed truer than ever. 

All the same, he couldn’t shake his discomfort. He knew it played along his face, just as it lined his words. 

“Sounds like a story for John to spin, not me. Abigail’s his girl.”

“I believe John’s got a lot of skill,” Dutch assured him, hands up and palms out, all _hear me out_ , “but pretending to be a kindly, white-picket-fence family man ain’t one of them. I need somebody who cleans up well and can look the part. John’s never looked anything but what he is, which is… rough.”

Arthur’s eyebrows shot up. John looked rough, but _he_ didn’t? -- A part of him begged to pry into the real reason. Begged to know if Dutch’s belief in John’s loyalty wavered at last over his year-long disappearance. Knew without asking that wasn’t it, however; and so rather than pick at scabbed wounds (his, more than Dutch’s), he guffawed, glancing away. 

“Dutch, you’ve lost it. I’m no good at acting.”

“Hardly any acting’s involved. You know having this land could change everything for us.” Dutch stepped in closer. Set a hand on Arthur’s shoulder, a warm weight that buoyed his mood more than such a small act deserved. Dutch had an incredible, life-changing plan every season-- _but_ , while most didn’t work out exactly right, they all had worked out in some way. Arthur begrudgingly acknowledged that, if only in his own head. “Imagine it. No more running. No more hiding. A place for us to be free with our ideals. I’ve been promising the best for our family, Arthur, and this here is a chance for me -- for _us_ \-- to finally provide that.”

Arthur gave him a miserable side-eye. “Okay, Dutch, _sure_. I’ll admit. That sounds great. But Utah’s _far off._ There ain’t somewhere closer?”

“I hear you, son, I really do. But trust me, this land’s a good bet and, moreover, we’ll be fine without you for a month.” At Arthur’s skepticism, Dutch grabbed his other shoulder and looked him straight-on. Assured him, head bent close, “Wipe that look off your face and listen to me. We’ll keep lying low until you and her come back and tell us whether the land’ll work.” Then, his voice dropped low. Put a hot stone at the base of Arthur’s spine and winding a pleased shiver up his back and through his bones to settle, encouraging and demanding in equal weight and part, around his heart. “You’re the only one I trust with this, Arthur. This is bigger than some-- train. This is a chance at a _home._ ”

Apprehension fought with anticipation. It was something new. A land of their own? Not just hiding out at Bessie’s, or Annabel’s parents’, or Mary’s...

The pressure of what Dutch was asking him to do hit. 

Apprehension won in spades. Yet, he forced himself to not kick up a fuss; to say, steady, so Dutch knew he’d picked right, “I hear you. I… Abigail and me, we can do that.” 

Dutch clapped him on the shoulder, once. Grinned, bright as the sun. Like any creature seeking the warmth, Arthur opened under it. Grew. Dutch wouldn’t steer them wrong. Even if the land didn’t work out, at least they gave it a shot. 

Dutch said, “Knew I could count on you, Arthur. Go collect Abigail. We’ll run over the finer details, and then you and her have a train to catch.”

Arthur nodded, then froze.

Blinked.

Blurted, “Wait. Now?”

Dutch looked back at him, one eyebrow quirked. “Yes, now. The seller’s expecting you within the week.” At Arthur’s clear hesitation, he continued, a touch amused, “Is that an issue, Arthur?”

The trip he’d planned with Charles came back to him. He was sure Charles could hunt a black bear on his own-- he was plenty capable- but, their joint hunts had become something of a routine. A month’s worth of a routine, sure, which made it not too grand in the big scheme of things. Irregardless, very few routines graced the life of an outlaw, and Arthur found himself as loathe to abandon the start of this one.

When he looked back up from where his gaze dropped to the ground, an unfamiliar look on Dutch’s face greeted him. It was… darker. Doubting, almost. His own choice in selecting Arthur or in Arthur himself, well, the distinction didn’t ultimately matter.

Thankfully, it smoothed away when Arthur mumbled, “No. No trouble. Got to let Charles know I won’t be joining him on a hunt, is all.”

“I’ll apologize to him personally for pulling you away so short notice,” Dutch drawled. Rather, teased.

Put like that, it did seem a minor thing. They’d always need feeding. A little interruption in their routine which was more chore than anything else didn’t mean anything.

Anyway, Dutch didn’t ask lightly of Arthur’s time. The land deal mattered quite a bit.

Didn’t change the fact he’d rather not leave camp for so long. Didn’t change, either, the stink eye John gave him when he explained Dutch had asked _him_ to play the part of Abigail’s husband. Abigail looked surprised, too, though more contemplative than angry (as opposed to her child’s actual father). Hosea played mediator, luckily; his presence kept Arthur from saying too nasty a comment about John’s ability to even _play at_ being family, and John from throwing back an insult fit to cut. Hosea ushered Abigail, Jack and Arthur off to the nearest train station before blows could fly. Told them about how Trelawney was already out there, paving the way for them. Turned out Mormons disliked the government near as much as they did ( _though for far different reasons_ , Arthur muttered and Abigail laughed; Hosea countered, smiling, _don’t be so quick to think so, my dear, uninspired brute!_ ) and they’d never started trouble in that particular state, so the likelihood of their being recognized was remarkably low.

Swift as their departure was, Arthur had only the briefest moment to bid the camp good-bye. He spent a portion of it wishing Charles the best on his hunt, and saying he’d join for the next. 

Charles took it with a plain, straight-forward, and ultimately lackluster reaction. He wished Arthur luck with his, “... Land acquisition?” -- with a touch of bemusement over his pretending to be Abigail’s husband and Jack’s father. Arthur hadn’t a decent explanation for Charles, who proved to have no taste for needless lying or long cons, and so they parted with minimal fanfare. No logical reason explained why _the lack_ , typically the usual good-bye for a new _cause_ of Dutch’s, made him feel like pins and needles had been pressed to his innards. 

_Except that wasn’t true._ Arthur knew very well why he felt different with Charles. Would’ve had to be five shades dumber not to. 

(Hell if he didn’t wish he were five shades dumber, right then and always.)

Really, compared to doing things right with Charles, finding his long-term family a home was incredibly low pressure. At least with the latter, he had Trelawney to help with the talking and the knowledge that, at the end of the day, it was just another con. In the former, there was no guide fit to turn to except his own heart, which had proved time and again to be one untrustworthy bastard.

* * *

The wild land was a dozen acres open and absolutely perfect. The nearest town was a Mormon’s paradise, which made them at once stick out terribly while being the pariahs nobody wanted to look too close at (once they figured out the model family was harmlessly uninterested in conversion). It was an altogether successful excursion and left Trelawney with an amazingly pristine record with the local bank, though by the end of their mandatory schmoozing with the locals and talking up the so-called darling family they wanted to start, both Abigail and Arthur would’ve sat themselves on a cacti if it meant they could get _home_ any faster. 

Jack was happy as a clam to ride a train and eat new foods, at least. And as for Arthur and Abigail-- they slept in the same beds without touch or glance, both their hearts lingering on others miles away.

Everything went well at their to-be home, which naturally meant everything went to shit at their their always-had-been home.

They returned to Boadicea tied up outside the train station with a scrap of a boy paid _by some feller with a receding hairline, mister_ to watch her, which tipped Arthur off to check the post for letters. Lo and behold, the postman handed over a short address to _Tacitus and Beatrice Kilgore_ telling them of a job gone south and, in not so many words, that they’d hastily headed north into the mountains to escape local trouble. This, Arthur read and comprehended a scant five minutes before they waltzed out of the post office and into a veritable den of salivating hellhounds in the shape of lawmen.

Arthur, they obviously recognized. Abigail and Jack, they didn’t even spare glances for.

Arthur told Abigail to take Boadicea and Jack and go. Abigail, smart woman she was, didn’t argue, but told him to meet up with her at Strawberry’s inn once he’d lost his blue, trigger-happy tail. From there, they’d find their family.

What happened at Blackwater, Arthur never fully understood. Something about a ferry; something about Micah and Dutch losing it; something about a girl, murdered in a beastly manner. What he did understand was Utah was another plan unfulfilled, with the sole benefit being Hosea’s bitter smile and wistful comment on what could’ve been.

Caught in the Grizzlies’ grizzly blizzards and frozen mountainside, there were no routines to restart or maintain. Hunting became a matter of pure survival, conducted as it was with teeth-clenching hunger and frostbitten fingertips. In any case, his time away had done well to clear his head over Charles, and to remember where his loyalty would always lie first and foremost: in the whole, not the individual.


	3. Chapter 3

People claimed soulmates that walked together were capable of the impossible: of death-defying feats of strength and resilience, of lifting wagons or trees off their loved ones while fighting off bears with no more than a knife, of surviving otherwise fatal wounds and illnesses. Just as they claimed a myriad of possibilities, they claimed the incredible manifested due to a plethora of reasons: for some, God’s gift of untarnished love to His people; for others, innate strength made by the fated joining of two halves into one.

Most five to ten years into living alongside their soulmates claimed it was all bullshit, only to pause and note, hands up and expression wry, _but who knows! Maybe one day when we’re old, she’ll save me from a mountain lion and make up for how she’s prattled my ear off_. Of course, the _most_ were God-fearing innocents and townsfolk who hadn’t traveled more than fifteen miles outside of their birthplace. 

The ideal was nice, anyway. The dream. The _what if_. 

Kieran Duffy wouldn’t know, as he’d lost track of his soulmate -- his older sister -- eleven years into his life. 

The story wasn’t that exciting. Mother and father dead by cholera before his tenth birthday. Sister and he struck out on their own. Woke up one morning to find his sister gone, having left - apparently willingly - in the middle of the night. Maybe taking care of him had gotten too hard for a young girl to do; maybe she’d gotten an offer she couldn’t refuse, but which also didn’t allow a snot-nosed, half-wit brat to follow along in. Maybe she’d been coerced. He liked to imagine his sister had done it _for his own good_ , with a plan that she’d return for him when she was good and able, just as he imagined always finding her once he had something to show for himself. But then, he liked to imagine a lot in his relatively life went differently than it had.

Last he’d checked, the mark on his finger hadn’t blackened. For years, he’d done his best to convince himself that knowledge was enough-- far over two decades later, he’d managed to believe it. 

Thing was, being tied to a tree didn’t exactly give a fellow much ability to check his hands. It did if he pushed himself to twist and crane and sometimes he did, just for something of his own to look at when it appeared nothing’d be his again (power over his own life included) but mostly he sat and tried to think on anything other than how he was sure to die very, very soon. If not by the van der Linde’s hands, then by his stomach gnawing its way clean through his spine. Maybe if his sister were around it’d go different. 

_Why would it go different? She weren’t no cook._

She’d been twelve. Of course she’d been no cook.

A bit of him had always thought he’d meet her again before they passed on. At present, it didn’t seem to be in the cards. 

More’s the pity. 

“How’s that tree treating you, O’Driscoll?” 

He dragged his gaze up from his boots to settle, unsteady, on the man who’d dragged him in to this mess.

“Told you,” he croaked, his throat parched and cracked, “I’m not an O’Driscoll.”

“Sure,” Arthur Morgan drawled, a mug of steaming and delicious-smelling coffee in his hand. “Bet you were just running with ‘em for fun. Now look where that good time landed you.”

He didn’t really want a reply. 

Except he lingered long enough Kieran started to wonder that maybe he did. As he gathered his heat-scrambled thoughts together to give him what he wanted, the German-sounding fellow who ran the gang’s legal finances called for and stole away Morgan’s attention. Kieran watched as a grimace pinched Morgan’s face before he buried it in his coffee mug, which he took an unreasonably long pull from.

“Ah, duty calls. Don’t go anywhere,” he told Kieran, which he must’ve thought real funny. 

Kieran dropped his chin back to his chest and his eyes back to his boots rather than reply. Noted Morgan hesitated even more; braced himself briefly for _something_ painful to fall his way on account of his not thinking the quip so funny; then realized the lingering was because Morgan didn’t much want to attend to the German’s business rather than any malevolent intent toward his camp’s unwilling guest.

In any case, Morgan left without further harassment. Said to the German as he did, “Don’t get too excited, Dr. Strauss. I’m coming, I’m coming.”

As none immediately took his place, Kieran relaxed as much as he could. Sometimes he went whole days without anybody looking his way, which were the best times. The van der Lindes definitely lived in each other’s pockets, however, and tended to follow each other like money-crazed ducklings-- so if one stopped by, three others were likely to hover nearby in short order. It made _any_ attention a nightmare waiting to happen. Made every encounter an energy-drainer, too, even the ones short as Morgan’s most recent. Now, the best way to keep his mind off his aching joints, empty stomach and the very real knowledge that if he _did_ give them what information they wanted, he’d _absolutely_ be killed - by them or by the O’Driscolls -, was in learning the layout of the camp he’d been imprisoned in. 

Not necessarily the physical layout, of which he could see near nothing. But the moving bits, the peoples and their every day actions, he caught more of them than they probably realized. Not anything important, because they weren’t _dumb_ ; but useful for thinking on, yeah, most definitely. The real demon urging him to spill his meager guts about Colm would always be his impending death through torture and starvation, but boredom made up a close second. Figuring out the camp members’ quirks was as good as anything in beating back the latter.

And hell if they didn’t have _quirks_ aplenty. Sure, _ultimately_ , they weren’t so different from Colm’s gang. They were different in being so small in number despite their reputation, and putting up with each other’s bullshit better than the O’Driscolls ever did.

For instance: Strauss and Morgan. Seemed Morgan was Strauss’ go-to errand boy, but Morgan always did his best to avoid Strauss long as possible. This, despite Morgan clearly being capable of snapping Strauss’ arm like a twig and having far more seniority in the gang (albeit far less seniority in age).

For another: _Williamson._ Dutch had made it clear Kieran was to be left alive for as long as his body could keep itself going, but Williamson made it equally clear he’d happily snap _Kieran’s_ neck like a twig at the first lapse in Dutch’s interest. He also was a master at resorting to fists before words, which made him less than popular with the rest of the group, as well as sneaking himself an extra bowl of stew from Pearson’s pot when Pearson wasn’t looking, which was a talent Kieran witnessed near every time and also every time wished that extra bowl would somehow roll _his_ way rather than down Williamson’s greedy gullet.

Thanks to his temper, most folk in the camp gave Williamson the same room they’d give an irate bull. As such, maybe they missed how long Williamson’s eyes lingered below Marston’s belt when his back was turned, or how he’d get near _shy_ when told to do something small and simple for Morgan. 

Kieran didn’t miss it.

(If Williamson didn’t seem so hung-up over his interests, it wouldn’t have been strange. Polite society didn’t like folk lingering over those who weren’t their soulmate, but the mud and muck the camp slept in was a far cry from polite society. Problem was, he flustered and balked and made a big deal out of it while not acknowledging he did so, and that made his behavior off-putting, to say the least.)

He overheard Lenny Summers saying Micah Bell had gone _real crazy_ in Strawberry. He heard Javier Escuella practice his guitar and singing as if he were making the pretty-sounding notes up himself, which seemed an incredible boon for a camp that also sported the tone-deaf Uncle. He heard Morgan bring in Swanson, who went on to do nothing but bother those around him in various states of intoxication. He saw a horse break free from Marston’s clumsy attempts at cleaning dirt out of its hoof and bite him on the ass, which Marston fully deserved for jabbing deep as he did with the pick. He saw Dutch’s fussy Count entertain itself by stamping in mud puddles after a storm had passed, and how amused Karen Jones was to report the Count needed a brushing. Saw after through three bushes and over the top of an inconveniently located rock (he had to crane his neck something bad to catch the sight) the incredible sight of Dutch van der Linde on a knee with a scrub and bucket of water doing just that, as fussy about his horse as his horse was about anybody else touching it.

He saw a lot. He heard a lot.

He didn’t know until two weeks into being at Horseshoe Overlook that Arthur Morgan’s soulmate was at camp. By then, his vision had a habit of jumping and shifting if he moved his head too fast, so it’d taken catching _the looks_ no less than five times before he believed what he saw.

 _The looks_ were what he thought of any soulmate trying not to be too obvious about their preferred person. Usually it happened in a public space with prudish pairs who didn’t like the attention the thread brought and so stood far enough away it didn’t manifest, all while being louder than loud with _the look_. It happened over a tavern table, or across two trail riders heading who-knew-where, or while waiting around a campfire before a particularly high-risk, high-reward heist. In the van der Linde camp, there were about as many soulmates as Kieran had seen in the O’Driscoll crew: which was to say, barely any.

Dutch and Mathews’ reputation preceded them. Thick as the thieves they were, seeing the red thread wasn’t a shocker. Only curious part was the occasional spot of tension when Kieran overheard Hosea putting doubt on Dutch's ideas, which _didn't_ seem to be the entire reason Molly O’Shae occupied Dutch’s tent while Mathews slept close to the dirt with the rest of the gang members. One explanation, the easiest, was: trouble in paradise. It wasn't as uncommon as people thought. Another was simpler, and more likely, as the tension between the two's spats never seemed to last long (or at least, seemed doomed to repeat on a never-ending cycle): they truly had no regard for society's expectations. Really, society’s rules never had made much sense. Society ridiculed those like him and his sister enough, plus his sister leaving him, to make both those facts clear as new-spun glass. 

For a long while, Kieran didn’t see the Sean character people whispered about being Jones’ soulmate. He did hear Dutch ask her periodically if her mark had blackened. Heard him ask one time too many without following it up with action, as Jones laid in to him about her getting a party together to _find_ Sean if _that bastard Trelawney_ was going to take so _goddamned long._

Kieran figured that’d be it in the soulmate department. Then there came the morning Charles Smith and Morgan both went to get breakfast at the same time and that thread strung, red as fire, between them, and they acted as if it were nothing. Far as Kieran saw, they didn’t so much as chuckle about something they _must have_ intentionally been avoiding. 

Except then they spent the whole morning giving each other _the look_ when they were sure the other wasn’t looking. Smith was better at hiding his, Kieran would grant him that; but he busied himself with crafting wicked-looking arrows on a chair he specially set up with a direct sight-line to Morgan’s tent, where Morgan spent the quiet morning alternating between burying his nose in a book and writing in some old leather-bound journal and looking up to catch and then drop Smith’s gaze. Kept his expression Poker-neutral the whole time, as if he _didn’t_ know he was being watched when he _had_ to know, and yet did nothing to discourage Smith from doing it. 

After that, Kieran noticed the two danced around each other like that all the time. They both acted like they didn’t: they were all polite nods and the usual small-talk when they passed each other in camp. Sat together by the fire as anybody else, though always on opposite sides. Hitched their horses near each other. Shared camp chores same as anybody else. Never lingered too long, never spoke more than they needed. 

In other words: it was always awkward.

Seemed Morgan had convinced himself he wasn’t skirting around Smith like a teenager who’d just met their soulmate. He met any question by his gang members about it with a confusion too thick to be faked. _Charles can sleep wherever he wants,_ he’d say, or, _Why are you asking me what seasoning he likes?_ or, _I don’t know. Go ask him yourself._ Funny enough, similar questions posed to Smith were answered in exactly the same vein, only with less confusion and more a vibe of, _I know why you’re asking, and I’d rather you mind your own damn business_. Only time they acted truly normal was when they headed out together for a job.

It seemed an exhausting, confusing process. Kieran didn’t pretend to understand it. 

Just as he didn’t pretend to understand Dutch when he stopped by to ask him, “Hungry, Kieran?” 

Because it wasn’t malicious. Kieran had thought it was-- of course he had- but, the longer he stayed a prisoner, the more he realized Dutch didn’t mean him more harm than what his prior associations warranted. Yes, Dutch’s gang would’ve happily filled him with lead, but _Dutch…_

Near twenty days into his captivity, the way he started to see it was, Dutch was the only reason he hadn’t already died.

“Yessir,” was his answer more often than not. Only times he didn’t was when he forgot Dutch was, more than anybody else at camp was, not out to spill his blood.

Dutch would then ask, every time, “We can fix that. Easily. I just need you to answer one thing for me.” Sometimes Kieran replied. This time, he didn’t. Dutch continued, as if his silence were expected, “Where’s Colm, Kieran?”

“I don’t know,” was his answer every time. “Really, sir, I don’t _know._ They didn’t trust me with anything so important.”

Usually that was the end of it. Dutch would push more, or he wouldn’t, and eventually, Kieran would be left alone again to keep watch over a camp he was learning near as well as the O’Driscoll’s.

(People never expected him to notice anything. Thing was, he _noticed_ a lot plenty fine. He just didn’t ever want to get himself involved in it. That was how people lost their lives. That was how he was going to lose _his_ life, having finally involved himself too much with the O’Driscolls.)

This time, Dutch didn’t leave. 

He said, tone much darker and flatter than it’d ever been before, “A pity for you, boy.” 

Kieran knew that tone. Had heard it plenty before the man who’d said it put the lamed horse out of its misery.

He looked up expecting the glinting end of a revolver.

What he saw was Dutch turning away and calling, “Williamson! A moment of your time, please. I think it’s finally time we finish our business with our guest.”

“Wait,” he sputtered, shoving himself up to his feet. Didn’t sway only because the tree was right there, even though the vertigo that hit him insisted the whole world had started tilting. “Wait, wait, you don’t-- I-”

“Noticed you have a soulmate, O’Driscoll. We could mail them for you.” This, blithely. “Though I imagine they’ll learn well enough the part about your fate that matters before the post reaches them.”

Kieran could hardly hear him through the rush of panic in his ears. It was the sound of drowning.

That evening, sure he’d be dead before the morn, he blathered before Williamson could make him resemble a gelding in the worst manner possible, “I know where he is! I do! And I’ll tell you! In fact, I’ll show you!” 

To his great surprise, he didn’t die by the morn. To his greater surprise, he didn’t die by the morning after, or the morning after that, or the morning after that. 

As it turned out, the Count was fussy, but not so fussy he wouldn’t let someone brush his coat in exchange for sugar cubes. That, atop his skill of staying out of everyone’s way, granted him enough good will not to be run out of camp, which was just about the only place he could see as safe from the gang he’d officially betrayed. Occasionally he wondered if they would take his chopping down the tree he’d been tied to as _offensive_. Sometimes he thought he’d die the death of a dog chained, circling the - comparatively large when compared to the tree - camp until the van der Linde’s chapter was forcibly closed. Mostly he kept to the horses and continued his watching, mouth kept shut tight.

* * *

The thing about Charles Smith was: he had never learned the skill of non-confrontation.

Issues he had, he sorted or he cut out. An easy enough policy when the only one a person had to worry about was themself. Easy still in a gang with a straight forward enough _earn your keep_ policy with the singular addition of _don’t be followed_. He understood there was more at work between certain camp members than working to live, and more Dutch wanted out of them than simple survival away from the law’s rigid expectations. He also knew that those things didn’t affect _his_ standing in the gang, and so he let them lie.

Arthur Morgan, however? Was swiftly becoming a problem that affected him directly.

The Grizzlies had lived up to their name. Survival became even Dutch’s sole focus, up until - and depending who you asked, including - Cornwall’s train. He tasked Arthur and Charles with hunting, and they accomplished that fine enough. More than fine, actually; Arthur, to Charles’ slight shock, knew how to listen. Not only that, but he was affable and easy to get along with. That, Charles suspected since their trip to Blackwater with Sean but found confirmed as they rode down the mountains, out of the gang’s ice-cold hell, and Charles paid witness to Arthur’s quiet deference to and appreciation for Hosea’s crafting tips. At first glance, Arthur Morgan was not the type for the more tedious, slow work required to make a palatable poultice.

Then again, at first glance, neither was Charles.

From a distance, Charles began to wonder if fate hadn’t messed up. 

Except it was _trying_ , to say the least, to catch Arthur alone. He’d thought they’d made decent progress in getting to know each other before Arthur had left for Utah. Or had it been before they’d been ran out of Blackwater? Didn’t matter, really, as they’d settled well and truly into the relief-soaked, life-as-usual routine of Horseshoe Overlook, and Arthur still wouldn’t give him more than the time of day his makeshift family demanded he give to jobs that Charles just happened to join in on. 

So it was less an inkling and more an understanding that Charles was being avoided. Again. Only this time, the reason why wasn’t so clear.

While cutting out the unsolvable from his consciousness was typically a skill he prided himself on, there was no simply walking away from this one. He’d decided that the morning after the night on the town, when he woke to Arthur looking a wreck, cheek streaked in dirt, hair mussed and skin an unhealthy, sleepless pallor in the hayloft’s sickly morning light. His knuckles had been bloodied. 

Unlike Arthur, Charles remembered most of that night. He remembered when Arthur, without pause, punched out their oh-so-kind driver for a stray comment that hadn’t even, comparatively, been the worst. Remembered them stumbling back into camp and Arthur shoving off Sean, too, for no reason other than he thought Charles hadn’t appreciated the commentary. 

Remembered catching him sneaking Taima an apple that evening. And, later, seeing him with the journal; and, being caught staring by Hosea, being told with a fond chuckle that Arthur wasn’t near as dumb as he played at.

Decent men were tough to come by. After that day, Charles had been convinced he’d found one. Whatever the thread meant-- and Charles had no idea what exactly fate had in store for them, and would be an idiot to try to guess, when he was already stupid enough to try to fight it- and whatever extent of _decent_ Arthur turned out to be, he was willing to get to know him.

Thus why Charles watched Arthur when he could, to figure out what might be the valid reason he didn’t want anything to do with him. Some believed soulmates were the devil’s work. Stories went that some peoples even forced soulmates to fight to the death upon reaching adulthood. Going by Arthur’s obvious and curiously protective nature of Hosea and Dutch’s bond, though, and the way he once overheard Arthur offering Karen to go to town and gamble away her sorrows when Dutch had bluntly pried into Sean’s status through her mark, he didn’t think it was anything like that.

Didn’t seem to be _anything else_ , either. For a bit, he thought Arthur even venerated the bond for a married couple-- he was hard enough on John, after all, brother-like status be damned. But then it turned out John’s pension for running away was the problem, not his and Abigail’s loud marital strife. 

So maybe it was Charles, plain and simple.

Except that didn’t sit right. Arthur avoided dealing with him longer than necessary, but not in the way people did when they disliked another.

Throughout all this pondering, Charles quickly learned he lacked experience in - for lack of better word - _chasing after others._

And so, after a day’s deliberation, he approached it as he approached his other problems.

It didn’t take a genius to notice Arthur avoided him. Similarly, it didn’t take a genius to notice he avoided Strauss, too, even though Strauss always seemed to catch up to him (through direct or indirect pestering). Charles couldn’t exactly work out the problem Arthur had with Strauss aside from the general distaste for loan sharks which most shared; and so, at the start of one of Arthur’s debt-collection runs, Charles decided to approach him as he saddled up.

Kept himself more than an arm’s length away, because he was already going to bother the man about his business. Didn’t need to have their thread reminding him of what had to be part of the reason he avoided Charles.

He asked, point-blank, “Hey, Arthur. Where are you going?”

“You didn’t hear Strauss? Thought he’d ranted loud enough…” 

Grumbled, his head ducked and eyes hidden behind his hat as he stuck folded papers into his satchel.

“If you hate the business so much,” Charles pressed, unruffled, “why participate?”

“I ask myself that every damn time,” Arthur admitted, easier than Charles expected. He secured his papers and looked up to catch Charles’ eye, giving him a tight, closed-lip smile. “But, you know. We all gotta earn our keep. Just my poor luck that Strauss’ hinges much more on collecting than loaning, and he insists his collecting needs to be done a certain way that the others are, uh, ill-suited for.”

Dutch had twisted his arm into this one, in other words. Charles had observed enough about Arthur and Dutch to know there’d be no talking Arthur down from riding out to do as he was bid.

(That loyalty wasn’t a bad thing, necessarily. Charles didn’t understand it, but he wanted to. It spoke to a history of give-and-take, of reliance, of dedication. 

No. It wasn’t a bad thing at all, far as he could see.)

“Some bullshit about lacking _vigor_ ,” Arthur mumbled to himself as he straightened a kink in his horse’s reins, pulling Charles from his thoughts and smoothing out the vague frown he felt pull down his mouth. “Thinking it’s more everybody else’s too smart to say yes.”

Charles asked, “Where is this one taking you?”

“Emerald Ranch. Lady’s missed her pay day.”

“I’ll go with you.”

 _That_ got Arthur’s attention.

For two breaths, he froze. Then all at once he unfroze, pulling his horse’s reins to back her up.

“That’s fine,” he said in his usual carefree drawl, except it were far too hasty to be truly as he claimed, “one collector’s always been enough.”

“Especially when that collector’s you?”

Arthur’s unease cracked at the edge. A hint of a smile hit his face, though it wasn’t particularly kind or humourous, lest that humor be called dark. “Something about me riding up convinces folks it’s best to become honest real fast, I suppose. Might be my face. Or my gun.”

“Funny. Imagine I might inspire the same.” 

Arthur turned his horse away from camp. Didn’t kick it into going, however, which Charles considered as good as an invite to keep talking.

He frowned at Charles. Said, “What’s got you suddenly asking about Strauss’ business? Never knew you were interested in legal work and all its nasty dishonesty.”

Charles admitted, because he wasn’t one for lies, “I’m not. But I’d like to see how you handle it.”

Arthur squinted at him. “Why?”

“I taught you to hunt. Figure there must be something you can teach me.”

Arthur stared at him. Didn’t even bother protesting that he’d already known how to hunt, which let Charles know that the thoughts in his head were turning quite a bit. Charles held his gaze. Subtle though he kept his thinking, his discomfort and unusual pause translated to his horse; her tail flicked and her back hoof stamped, her head tossed up. She’d been hitched all day -- she was ready for a run. 

Finally, he broke the gaze to lean forward in his saddle and give his horse a pat on the neck. Said, his eyes on her, “This ain’t a thing I’d like to be remembered for. Besides, don’t reckon there’s anything I got to teach you. Not as if intimidating farmers and fishwives out of their family heirlooms is real intricate work.”

“Two would convince them a whole lot faster, I bet.”

Eying Charles up and down - _critical_ , not dismissive, because they both knew what picture he painted -, Arthur snorted. “Yeah. I bet.”

“I’ve been told I have an excellent scowling brute routine,” Charles dead-panned, “so it wouldn’t be any trouble to help out.”

“Uh-huh. I’m sure you’d tell Bill the same if he were on the rounds, too.” 

The moment the words left his mouth, Arthur looked like he dearly wanted to take them back. Glancing away, weight shifting in saddle, he cleared his throat. Cleared it again. Scratched at his cheek. 

With a sigh and absolute reluctance that on any other would have convinced Charles to move on, he waved Charles in. Said, “ _Alright._ If you’re so… insistent. Be warned, you show any promise and I’m telling the doctor. Strauss’d be beside himself to have twice the muscle to send on his errands.”

Charles believed him when they rode out in silence for Emerald Ranch. After playing broad-shouldered shadow to Arthur’s snarling bulldog and seeing just how Arthur’s newly split lip curled when he ruffled through the debtor’s knocked-unconscious friend’s pockets for chump change, though, he had the vague notion Arthur wouldn’t breathe a word of Charles’ involvement to Strauss. In part because it was truly work Arthur despised, and what he despised he rarely wished upon himself, let alone the rest at camp. In larger part however because Arthur straightened up, pocketed the money he’d found, and caught how unimpressed Charles looked with the entire operation. 

“Least this blockhead could throw a punch,” Arthur told him gruffly as they saddled back up. “Last dupe Strauss sent me after didn’t even speak English, let alone read it.”

“He knows his market,” Charles allowed. “The desperate.”

“Yeah, well.” Arthur turned his head and spat red. Rubbed the back of his hand, knuckles bloodied for more reason but less need than they had been in Blackwater, across his mouth. “Could stand to be a little less desperate.”

“Thief! Those men are thieves!”

The woman. She ran into the ranch proper, her arms in the air and words grabbing every lazy, bored worker’s attention.

Arthur straightened up and protested, exasperated, “We ain’t thieves, it’s what she owed-- aw, shit. Time to make our exit, Charles.”

They wheeled their horses around, drove their heels into their sides, and did just that.

It wasn’t nice work. It definitely didn’t suit Charles.

But it didn’t really suit Arthur, either. Not from Charles’ perspective, anyway, though he tolerated Arthur saying he had the wrong idea about what suited Arthur because, if it were anything, it were work he excelled at, and nobody could deny that. Charles didn’t deny that, however; he just thought if given the option, Arthur would certainly never run another collection in his life. 

For that reason, Charles invited himself into the next. 

The first having made it less a shocker that he’d ask, Arthur didn’t protest as much. Just told him to grab his weaponry and be ready to look menacing as possible. Not that he thought this feller would need much menacing, but people could be surprising. Kieran Duffy unwittingly made himself an example of such a surprising person as he watched them go from the midst of the horse herd, a saddle on the post in front of him and polishing rag in hand. Charles had thought the man would’ve ran off soon as he could, O’Driscoll threat be damned; or, even more likely, to turn them over to the O’Driscoll’s in exchange for his safety. He hadn’t expected the group to come back from the O’Driscoll cabin with news that Kieran was the reason Arthur had returned at all.

(A bit of him wondered if he owed Kieran gratitude in the same way Arthur did. The rest of him decided firmly that he did not, on account of Arthur and him not being as close as all that despite the string tying them together.)

“Strauss seemed bent out of shape on this one,” Charles noted as they rode out under the midday sun. Here was work they could do in the daylight; and yet, they were anything but happy. 

“He don’t like being reminded he’s doing the devil’s work,” Arthur replied. “And this feller’s a right do-gooder. You might’ve seen him talking about saving the meek and helpless, or some such, around Valentine.”

As it turned out, Charles had seen Thomes Downes before. Not in a while, however, and the _why_ became clear as he had no breath to reply to Arthur’s demands, his countenance shrunken from severe sickness.

He owed more than the land was worth. He had already sold all but his family.

Arthur told him to sell his wife, his voice a low growl, his broad shoulders back and fists clenched. He was ready to bloody his knuckles yet again for reason and need far, far less than the times prior. He painted a mean picture. With Charles at his shoulder, he surely looked to Downes as a personification of Death, arriving early but not entirely unexpected.

Charles was no stranger to cruelty. 

He refused to be beholden to it.

Arthur curled a hand in Downes’ shirt. Raised his other fist high, lost as he was in the job he didn’t believe he could turn down.

“Arthur,” that stilled Arthur’s fist from flying, though he didn’t look back, “let’s go. He’s useless for it.”

“Needs more persuasion, I’m thinking,” Arthur said, sickly sweet. “Debt dodgers always do.”

Arthur’s shoulder jumped when Charles put a hand on it. It stiffened as glowing red stretched between them, tension of a different sort snapping up his spine. Downes sputtered nonsense about listening to one’s whole heart. Words Charles didn’t care to catch, as then Arthur shrugged, violent, his hand uncurling from Downes’ shirt to brush Charles’ off.

It was the first time since Blackwater’s black-out night they’d touched. It still sent a warm jolt up Charles’ arm. In favor of the man clearly, slowly dying in front of them, Charles ignored it to turn his most stubborn look on Arthur and re-iterate, “He has _nothing_.”

Arthur scoffed at him. Rocked back on his heels. Looked to be contemplating whether or not he wanted to punch Downes anyway.

Released, Downes slid to the dirt, his mouth buried in the crook of his elbow as he coughed and coughed and _coughed._ Wetly, too. When he pulled away his head to look blurrily up at them, the red stains along his sleeve were all too prominent.

The wife and boy came out of the house, then. Arthur swung around to face them. Just as quickly as they started shouting in alarm and concern and made their way quickly to the meager garden patch, Arthur turned his head and spat at Downes’ feet.

He said, “I’ll be back. And next time, my friend here won’t be as nice.”

While they were still on the ranch,Charles kept his opinion to himself. Silence did its job far more than words, in his experience.

The wife and boy waited for them to leave the gated space before rushing to their husband and father’s side. The wife, stubborn as any rancher on the colonist’s frontier, called them a number of things, the least of which included naming them as Thomas’ murderers. Arthur repeated his promise of a later return. Charles held his tongue.

They saddled up. They left. 

They rode down the ranch’s narrow slope of a road. Arthur took a right instead of a left at the fork, however, making not for the camp but for the river.

Overhead, the sun shined on. 

At the river’s edge, Charles expected it when Arthur wheeled his mare in front of Taima, forcing both of their horses to a sudden, head-tossing stop. 

“The hell was that, Smith?” Arthur snarled, his eyes still wild with cruelty. “They always say they’ve got nothing left to give. Convincing them otherwise’s the whole damned point of us being there.”

“You told him to sell his _wife._ ”

“Did I? Well, I weren’t wrong.” Flippantly and meant to hurt. Teeth bared and eyes wild. It was obvious Arthur put himself into a certain mentality to accomplish what Strauss sent him to do. On reflection with the aid of hindsight, it became equally obvious that it wasn’t a mood easily shrugged off when unexpectedly interrupted. “Warned you this was a nasty business. Not my fault you weren’t listening.”

“You know you’d have killed him if you beat him,” Charles accused, _unyielding_. “For what crime? Taking money from a hyena like Strauss-- that’s not right.”

“Always so set on doing what’s right, ain’t you.”

“This work doesn’t suit you.”

“But it’s work that’s got to be _done._ ” Then, sharp, his head tilted down and hand making a cutting gesture toward Charles. “And you know what? You’re finished.”

Not expecting the shift, that brought him up short. Practically pulled the rug from under his feet.

He managed a, “What?” -- not, in that moment, thinking about the debt collections, but something much broader and relevant.

“You got your taste. You’ve spoken your mind. Now leave the actual work to me.”

_Oh._

Right.

That was better. Not unknown ground, at least.

Charles shook his head. Resisted the urge to reach out and shake Arthur, too; didn’t, because they weren’t that close, and also because he wasn’t sure it would actually get anything through the other’s selectively thick skull. 

“Leave the collecting behind altogether, Arthur. Have Strauss send someone else.”

“What is this all really about?” More frustrated, now. “You don’t go pestering John to let you in on jobs you weren’t invited to. Why’re you dogging me?”

He said before he could stop himself, plain and pointed: “Stupid doesn’t suit you, either.”

Arthur opened his mouth, a sharp rebuttal hovering on the tip of his tongue, ready to spill out. It didn’t. He caught the somber expression on Charles’ face -- _really_ caught it -- and swallowed the insult down. Looked at Charles then like a sailor lost at sea: confused, alone, and in sore need of direction, lest he fall to true helplessness. 

“Should’ve figured it was about… our...” Trailing off, he gestured again. Looser, wider. Without real meaning. Searching for meaning, more like-- him being lost at sea and all. Charles watched in silence, let him tie himself into a knot over finding the right words ( _hell if he knew what to say_ , after all). Finally, Arthur forced out a low, near embarrassed, “Reckon there’s better times to talk about _that_ than right now.”

“Reckon you weren’t planning on talking about it at all given the chance.”

“You’re probably right.” Uncomfortable, but honest. He struggled and eventually managed to meet Charles’ gaze. Holding it, he admitted, “Just not sure what to do about any of it.”

“You think I do?” By how Arthur’s head jerked back, he did think so. Charles snorted, shaking his head again. “Always thought it was ridiculous everyone only gets one shot at this. It adds too much pressure.”

Arthur looked askance at him. “You don’t act it. Least, I can’t tell.”

He gave him a shrug, suddenly uncomfortable himself.

Seemed to him he had acted it. As Arthur said, he didn’t go inviting himself into places he wasn’t wanted (not unless he was planning a robbery, that was). There was the way folks either avoided talking about Arthur to him, too, going so far as to cut themselves off mid-mention with a questioning look toward him, as if the name itself was liable to make him react… _some way._ He’d never understood what they expected. 

Then again, he didn’t much understand what he’d expected, either. Or rather, what he’d hoped for.

He’d just gotten sick of the uncertainty. Whether or not the whole fated business was a disappointment didn’t matter, he thought, in the face of whether or not Arthur would treat him the same as he treated the rest of the camp. Having observed his loyalty and love in action over the last few months, Charles figured that’d be plenty.

“I’m figuring it out,” he said, “same as you.”

Arthur took that well enough. Nudged his horse out of Charles’ way, his eyes drifting over the empty, grassy hills and down the river’s peaceful shoreline. Loons drifted on the smooth water’s edge, their feathers glossy in the sunlight.

He said, quiet as the land around them, the fight leftover from their race away from the Downes’ ranch dimmed to mere embers, “Never been a fan of the whole business. The… thread and, fate and, all that. Always thought it better suited to the storybooks.”

“No wonder you were avoiding me.” Arthur shot him a look, as if up until then he’d believed Charles _hadn’t noticed._ “Not as if we’re storybook material.”

“No,” he admitted with a grimace turned smile, “we’re really not.”

“I’ve always found life goes easier without high expectations.”

He said, the pinched shadow between his eyes betraying the underlying worry, “Didn’t mean to let you down that bad.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

Also, it plain wasn’t true. Thus far, the van der Linde gang had been more than Charles ever _could_ have expected. Arthur, too, by virtue of not looking down his nose at him or disappearing through his increasingly awful imagined possibilities. Compared to what _could’ve been_ , it wasn’t the worst. It also wasn’t the best. But then, very little was or could be.

“I know,” Arthur relented, again glancing away. His hat cast a shadow across his face, turned his cheekbones sharper than usual. Even from paces away, his eyes gleamed blue as the river. “I just… Give me some more time. To think about it all.”

“We don’t have to talk at length about being paired.” Charles gave his own grimace. It didn’t turn into anything even vaguely related to a smile. “In fact, I was hoping we wouldn’t.”

Arthur blew out a breath, shoulders dropping a centimeter. “Thank goodness.”

“But,” Charles started-- and Arthur finished, “no more avoiding.”

They caught each other’s eyes again. 

A short, sharp nod. Unlike their morning in the barn, Charles had a feeling this day’s understanding wouldn’t be so hastily buried and forgotten.

The worst of the storm between them passed, Arthur said, wry, “Can’t exactly go back entirely empty-handed. What say you we haul in some fish for appeasement?”

“Never was one for fishing,” Charles said. “I haven’t even got a pole.”

“Hunting, then?”

“Plenty of waterfowl about.”

“Duck it is.”

A smile, white gleaming thin and hopeful.

Charles didn’t return it, but he felt his expression soften. By how Arthur’s smile lifted further at the corners, he caught it.

* * *

“Is something different about those two?”

Subtle as ever, Uncle twisted around on the stool he sat upon to peer where Abigail _quietly_ gestured to. Abigail thought briefly about bringing up Uncle’s _lumbago_ and how its favorite target was often his oh-so-aching back, but decided the bemoaning she’d inspire wasn’t worth it. In any case, Uncle for once in his life reacted fast enough she didn’t have the time to tease.

 _The two_ in question were Arthur and Charles. The two stood close: Arthur, with his hands flat on the camp’s main table and back bowed over the map Dutch pulled out to help plan Sean’s rescue, and Charles, arms folded and expression one of severe concentration as he listened to whatever Dutch had to say about what they knew thus far. Javier had left the day before to speak with Trelawney. He’d meant to take Charles, but Arthur and he had been off on a collection for Strauss. Instead, Karen went with him-- which had been just as well, as the moment they news about Sean’s whereabouts, she hadn’t put down her shotgun or taken off her riding boots for anything short of sleeping. Tilly had been ready to smother her if she didn’t quit stressing, understandable though it was.

Between Arthur and Charles gleamed a loose loop of red. A rare sight, to be sure; even rarer was how natural both acted, as they tended to shy away quicker than a rabbit from a hound dog at its first appearance.

“Ah,” Uncle said slowly, hand stroking at his beard as if he were a wise old sage, never mind the only thing that tumbled from him were dislodged crumbs of ancient bread, “seems they’re finally acting the way fate intended.”

“Is that what you’d call it?” She grumbled, a mite frostier than she intended. 

He twisted back around to give her a _come on, now, don’t be so sensitive_ look. As he had no place to tell her that, she frowned back at him.

He put up his hands immediately, grinning to ward off her ire. 

Despite herself, it worked. Her frown lessened.

He said, “Just saying, it was about time! Was beginning to think they lacked all hope.”

“That’s true,” she allowed. “They were acting worse than John when Grimshaw drags him off for a bath.”

Uncle chuckled. “Impressive, that. Always thought Arthur the less emotional one.”

“Every man has his flaw.” 

“John just happens to have many.”

“I’m the last you have to tell that,” she said, without heat.

“Ooh, careful. You’re sounding almost sweet on him.” 

Uncle thought himself _so_ funny. Abigail rolled her eyes at his sniggering. Took a moment longer to sneak a glance at Arthur and Charles, noting again their proximity with absent curiousity. She wondered vaguely what had changed; wondered if it were something she and John could manage; and then dismissed all such thoughts, as it really wasn’t her business.

What she took in and didn't forget was the ease in Arthur's shoulders as he turned to discuss something with Charles. The tilt to Charles' head as he listened and responded. How they both leaned toward each other and seemed to make a small world between them and only _for_ them, even with Dutch right there. 

Charles, Abigail thought, would not quickly take Arthur for granted. 

As for Arthur-- well. It was about time Arthur had someone who saw him for all he was, and didn't need him to change a thing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thus ends the first installment of this series! Thank you very much for reading. Hope you enjoyed (even though this part was more build-up to Charles/Arthur than actual. Those boys are stubborn). Future pieces will be within the series, and probably largely one-shots / mini-chapters.
> 
> Thank you so much for reading! As always: [tumblr](https://unkingly.tumblr.com/) / [twitter](https://twitter.com/exkingly). Follow if you like. :)


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